AZ-900: Is a "traditional" datacenter a private cloud?

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Hello,

For the purposes of "Microsoft Azure cloud concepts" in the Az-900 exam, would a "traditional" datacenter operation with some public facing service count as a private cloud?

By traditional datacenter:

• On-premise server room
• Inside said server room is a rack containing web servers with a hardware load balancer
  • You're not scalable because you literally need to rack a new server to scale out
• You are doing plain old VLANs with switches and routers (so no intent based networking, VMWare VXLAN, etc)
  • Again you have no elasticity because someone has to at least dive into command line or scripts manually, or run cable to create a new network segment

Personally, I think it that setup is not private cloud because you have a bunch of hardware and software with an Internet-facing presence, but you lack Elasticity and Agility from the "Explore key cloud concepts".

Looking at Microsoft's own "Define private cloud", it is ambiguous or at least unclear:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/distinguish-types-cloud-models/3-define-private-cloud

Oddly a traditional datacenter meets everything discussed in that page except for the fact that it can't really be called "cloud" since it lacks a lot of the advantage.

So for the exam, do they consider any 100% on-premise compute service a "private cloud", or does a private cloud need to cover a certain amount of "cloud computing" properties before you call it a private cloud?

(I'm thinking there must be some threshold you need to cross, or else you could naively say that a single physical web server and physical router/firewall directly attached to a modem in the office is a private cloud )

EDIT: Move section to Azure

@Patrick-Santos ,

You are correct, a traditional datacenter would not be considered a private cloud. Providing a service or two, like web services, etc. is not enough. When you think of cloud services, public or private, you think compute resources, storage resources, etc. being made available.

The questions about scalability are valid, to a point. Cloud services offered by a third party are probably going provide a greater level of scalability and elasticity, and probably easier too. But a private cloud hosted in an organizations datacenter can still be scalable. When you think about scalability and elasticity, think about VMs. If I have three VMs hosting an app in Azure, and need to add more VMs, it's easy to do because Microsoft has racks and racks of physical servers. But there are times when they need to add more physical servers as well. In your private cloud, you will have a certain amount of physical resources (compute, memory, storage) An app you are hosting won't be consuming 100% of your resources. If the app needs more, you should be able to add more. Sure, at some point you will need more physical resources. That's the advantage of public clouds, and third party private clouds (aka dedicated public cloud). They typically have a vast amount of physical resources, so adding more memory or storage is as easy as using a wizard.

Hope this helps!

Thank you for the note about the services to distinguish "traditional" and "cloud".

Interesting: I think Microsoft changed all the documentation since the time I asked this, probably in line with that mention they adjusted the exam. At a glance, it looks like they removed the blurb about skills required to operate each type of cloud. The descriptions for each cloud type are also much shorter in general.