I understand the concept of cloud computing, but I'm curious why the term has become so exhausted the past several years. Servers have been around for a long time, and I fail to see how this is any different from before the term "cloud computing" was in fashion. There are many more vps services and more systems and complexity, but
Cloud Computing – Is Cloud Computing Mainly Just a Marketing Term?
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The distinguishing feature of "cloud computing" is indeed the way that it is marketed, in particular, the way that it is priced.
Another synonym for "cloud computing" that I personally prefer is "utility computing", and that term describes best what it is all about: it is priced and used like any other utility, water, gas, electricity.
You only pay for what you use, when you use it, you don't have to configure anything, you don't have to rent anything, you don't have to prepay anything. You are automatically billed monthly based on your very fine-grained actual usage.
It really is like a utility: if you want to wash your hands, you open the tap a little bit and a bit of water comes out. If you are filling your pool, you open the tap more and more water comes out. You don't have to prepay the water, you don't have to call the water company and ask them to send you water, you don't have to arrange anything. You just open the tap, and there is instant water.
Utility computing resources are the same way.
This is different from anything we had before. We had rented servers in data centers, but we had to pay those whether we used them or not. Even in the (very short and unsuccessful) era of Application Service Providers (ASPs, anybody remember those), you generally had a monthly or yearly plan. There were mainframe sharing systems where you were billed by the CPU second, but those weren't as instantaneous as utility computing resources, you generally had to pre-arrange some stuff.
And in the field of economics, the sub-field that deals with how to assign prices to products, and how to bring those products to the market is called "marketing", so you are almost right: "cloud computing" is mainly a marketing term, but I would very much object to the word "just" in your sentence:
Because the marketing aspect of cloud computing is precisely what makes it different from everything that came before, and what made it so disruptive.
There are other parts of the "utility" metaphor that are also applicable to utility computing, such as the fact that you don't need to care where your water comes from and how it gets to your tap, you just turn on the tap, and water comes out. The water could come from a tank, a reservoir, a lake, a river, a well. The electricity could be generated by wind, solar, geothermal, coal, nuclear, it could come directly from a plant owned by your provider or by a plant owned by a different provider who then sold the energy to your provider, etc.
This is where the "cloud" term comes in. It comes from system diagrams, where the network was always drawn simply as a "magical cloud" that does everything, and you don't really need to concern yourself with how it works. That is the metaphor that "cloud computing" is meant to invoke. The cloud is just this thing that is always there, always works, and you don't need to worry about it.