The implied question was what OP's idea of "the cloud" is, where they draw the line between "cloud" and server host. It's possible they simply aren't familiar with the Iaas/PaaS terminology.

You know, we used to have a single tech company providing essentially an entire tech stack to its customers. Its core enterprise pricing provided a platform with impressive compute capabilities, high redundancy, global support, strong backward compatibility and the backing of a company providing consulting and an ecosystem made of a lot of other software products. That company is still alive and well, although that product is probably less appealing now to new customers.

I'm talking about IBM mainframes.

Eventually, as the Internet (networking) and open source technologies (like Git and Linux) become more and more widespread, people realized they could build their services by combining products from different vendors (not to mention FOSS). I'm talking about the 1990s-2000s.

Now, after 20-30 years, we're thinking that the same company must provide the entire tech stack or lose relevancy as a provider.

To be clear, AWS and mainframes are pretty different from a technical standpoint, but I do wonder if we're kinda repeating the same cycle over and over. Asking the same company to provide everything and then build stuff with different products, to then find a new company which can provide everything and so on.

Not sure I follow.

It's one thing to say that a lot of AWS/Azure/Google users take advantage of many managed services.

But saying something is not a cloud provider because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird, especially if you read the NIST definition of cloud computing or when you consider that not every AWS user is using more than a handful of services (does that make AWS a cloud provider only for more "advanced" users?).

Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers. They cannot attract users who are more familiar with specific managed services, but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set.

Also, limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms (think AWS -> Azure or viceversa), because you're less tied to specific proprietary tooling.