What is "the cloud"? #Cloud #CloudComputing #CloudNetworking

The cloud.

Conjures up all kinds of memories of looking toward the sky and gazing at these constantly evolving, ephemeral, floating objects.

In the tech world some terms are flexible and can be a bit tricky, or hard to contain to one concrete definition.

The “cloud” is a network “out there”.

Indeed the very internet itself can be the cloud in some ways. Many consumers quickly warmed up to cloud with the easy adoption of web-based email like “Gmail” which is essentially “email in the cloud”.

Instead of being stored on our local machines, we became used to storing our email with Google in their “cloud”.

But a “cloud” has to be physical somewhere. It’s not in actuality a legitimate, physical cloud sitting in the sky. And it typically physically resides in a data center.

Data centers are these vast, huge, sometimes-sprawling buildings dedicated to holding the back-end computer systems, machinery and associated components needed to help run what we consumers know of as “the internet”. In a way these data centers are “the cloud” that we think of when we say our info is “stored out there…in the cloud”, and these data centers can use as much electricity as a small town.

What is cloud? What is hybrid cloud? The term “cloud” can be a tricky thing.

First, the name.

Why “cloud”? Because it has to be coined something so that we can all refer to that object and ‘cloud’ best seems to capture the spirit or essence of what this process does.

Just like clouds in the sky are all different, unique, and constantly changing. Some can quickly scale in very little time into larger clouds, even rapidly scaling up into full-blown thunderstorm cell systems.

So it’s quite fitting after all that we use this term.

Cloud can be thought of as many different things depending on the person and circumstances. In the corporate enterprise environment organizations have multiple deployment options, including private cloud, public cloud, on-premise or hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud model is a mix of a company’s existing on-premise systems with private/public cloud resources and “as-a-service” packaged resources, creating a unique and tailored offering. This approach lets clients choose their preferred aspects of each various cloud resource. We as consumers have currently have a plethora of cloud services from the Big Tech companies to choose from including: Apple (iCloud), Amazon (AWS), Google (Google Cloud Platform), Microsoft (Azure), and IBM Cloud among others. The individual consumer could also go through a platform like Bluehost or GoDaddy and set up their own infrastructure by a renting a server and other backend services to cobble together their own cloud. Also, just like an individual consumer can do that, the bigger companies have had the same idea.

Generally, cloud refers to the on-demand delivery of computing resources including storage space, processing power, and bandwidth. Cloud has quickly grown in popularity with both the business set and consumers alike, especially after the tumultuous year that was 2020 and the spiking rise in remote-work demand due to Covid-19.

Heck, even State-Sponsored hacking groups are increasingly using cloud infrastructure[1]!!! (See here!)

Biblio: