To The CLOUD!

We've all seen the commercial where the actors are stuck in some situation where there is lots of time due to waiting, but they don't have access to their data to do some work until...the light bulb goes on and one of them shouts "To the CLOUD!"  Suddenly we are shown how, even while stuck in an airport with just a laptop, we can now grab our files, email, calendar, and even edit photos from anywhere in the world.

Geared more toward the business users out there, you may have heard of Windows Azure or Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) services or other options where business applications and data are stored and run from offsite "Cloud based" infrastructure.

What does it all mean? What is "the cloud?" What are "hosted apps?" What happens when I use Hotmail, Google Apps, Office 365, search with Bing or Google, etc?

You may have this picture in your head that there is a Dell Optiplex GX-2 under a desk somewhere that provides these types of services for you.

Obviously that's not what's going on.

"The Cloud" is a buzzword that is kind of hard to nail down. It's about as nebulous as its real-world counterpart, and that's ok.  There's a great reason for this.

When diagramming networks there are symbols for everything; computers, servers, printers, routers, hubs, switches, and on and on.  But when you get outside the bounds of the stuff you control, or to a place where you didn't need to be as specific about what exactly was out there, the cloud symbol was used. It represents that "gosh there's a lot of stuff out there and we really don't know/aren't concerned right now with what it is.

"The Cloud" is anything from Hotmail/GMail/Yahoo Mail to Instagram (running on Amazon EC2), to high-powered business apps you never knew weren't living inside the company whose logo is on the app.

It includes things like hardware you rent to store data or run software you "own," software you rent and run on rented hardware, or pieces and parts of all of these.

In its current usage it is really a marketing term that means "something else, somewhere else, using someone else's overhead" but as I said, it's a buzzword, so people use it waaaay too much!

That doesn't diminish its usefulness.  Benefits include a more robust disaster recovery/business continuity plan than most small and medium businesses could afford on their own, scalable computing power at prices lower than buying your own additional servers, scalability on the fly to meet more demand without downtime for configuration changes, redundancy, high speed access and so on.

Now though it's called "the Cloud," it doesn't move or evaporate.  It has to be somewhere physical.  Going back to the Optiplex mental picture, it's a little bigger than that.  Here is a great video tour of Microsoft's data centers which form a large part of "the Cloud."  It takes a look at all 4 generations of MS datacenters and I think you'll find it fascinating.



And here is a look at the Google Data center that might host this blog or your GMail.



So there you have it.  Hopefully this is and informative and interesting look into "the Cloud" and the things we do each day via the Internet.

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