What is the Cloud, really?
A 2026 update on cloud infrastructure for modern workloads
The cloud is often described as “someone else’s computer.” At its core, the cloud is a system for renting compute, storage, and networking instead of owning physical hardware. You don’t buy servers or disks. You consume abstracted resources on demand from massive shared data centers.
This abstraction changed everything.
It allowed companies to move faster, scale instantly, and stop worrying about hardware operations, when cloud first came out 20 years ago. For Web2 workloads - SaaS applications, websites, and consumer software, the cloud was a breakthrough that reshaped how software was built and deployed.
But that same abstraction is also the cloud’s biggest limitation.
How the Cloud Was Built
Early cloud was simple. Everything lived in one physical machine, with compute, memory, storage, and networking tightly sat together.
Then scale changed the requirements.
To enable flexibility and cost efficiency, the cloud decoupled the machine into layers - mainly compute, storage, and networking. Compute was virtualized, storage was separated, and networking was a common fabric; all turned into shared services. Each layer could now be independently scaled, sliced, and allocated across many users.
This design made the cloud highly elastic and economically efficient. But it also meant that performance was no longer isolated. Resources were shared, contention was the norm, and workloads began competing with each other under the same abstractions.
The Assumption the Cloud Makes
Traditional cloud infrastructure assumes workloads are bursty. A request arrives, work is done, and the system goes quiet again, like uploading a photo, editing a document, or streaming a movie. Activity spikes briefly, then drops back to idle. Performance doesn’t need to be constant, only good enough during spikes, which are handled through shared capacity, burst credits, and statistical averages.
The system works because not everyone needs peak performance at the same time.
That assumption no longer holds when it comes to the new internet.
Why Web3 Doesn’t Fit the Cloud Model
Blockchains don’t idle. Blocks keep coming, state keeps growing, and nodes operate under continuous load. Running blockchain infrastructure isn’t like running a website. It’s closer to running a continuous execution engine, with sustained reads, writes, and latency sensitivity that never pauses.
Always on.
In this environment, shared infrastructure and burst-based performance become liabilities. When compute, storage, and network are separated and shared, latency compounds and performance degrades over time. Systems behave unpredictably exactly when reliability matters most.
This isn’t a failure of the cloud. It’s the cloud doing what it was designed to do.
What we need is a cloud built on dedicated resources, designed for continuous execution, with sustained IOPS, and organized around blockchain nodes and their supporting infrastructure. Enter Nirvana.
Rebuilding the Cloud from the Metal Up
At Nirvana Labs, we don’t treat the cloud as a pure abstraction layer. We see the cloud as the starting point of your performance. Powered by dedicated bare-metal compute, high-IOPS storage, private networking, and fast RPC nodes, Nirvana rebuilds the cloud from the metal up, eliminating latency at every layer.
On top of that, Nirvana introduces node-level colocation, because blockchain infrastructure starts at the node, bringing compute, storage, and networking back together exactly where nodes live. What once required multimillion-dollar colocation builds and complex routing is now deployable in seconds, globally and economically.
Nirvana is a performance cloud for Web3 - built for always-on, ever-growing, compute-intensive workloads.
This is what the cloud becomes when it’s designed for Web3.
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Nirvana Labs: The Performance Cloud for Web3.
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