ReadWriteWeb has published a short and sweet interview with Matt Mullenweg regarding cloud computing. When asked if WordPress.com was hosted on a grid or in a traditional data center, Matt responded with:

“That’s a silly question, like asking whether Facebook is a cloud computing environment,” Most ‘clouds’ besides Amazon’s are just marketing BS. WordPress.com is a collection of many physical servers across multiple data centers to create a scalable, resilient environment for our customers. You could call it a grid, or cloud, we just call it service.”

Pretty cool to see Matt give the straight talk. As for the term cloud, I can’t think of a concrete definition of what that means other than what Amazon and other businesses have stated. So perhaps it really is marketing BS?

At the end of the article, you get a sense that sometimes, it’s just better to do things on your own without relying on a cloud or service provider.