The Cloud is just someone else’s computer. This is the dad joke of the engineering world. It also happens to be a pretty okay explanation of what Cloud is, much better than most serious explanations, which tend to involve terms like “servers”, and “data centers”, and the dreaded “latency”.
At this point, each one of us has enough personal information stored on the Cloud to give your average privacy advocate a nervous breakdown. It’s therefore a bit worrying that so few people actually know what Cloud is. It’s even more worrying that it’s so hard to find a decent explanation. I discovered this recently while trying to explain Google Docs to my mother over Whatsapp.
So in the interest of saving myself, her and you some trouble next time, here is my attempt at a decent explanation.
Cloud in a Nutshell
If you only have time to read one paragraph, here is the short, simple explanation you were looking for:
“The Cloud” is a group of Big Computers, made up of hundreds of connected machines running on shelves in a warehouse somewhere. They belong to big tech corporations (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others). Lots of websites you use live on these machines, and your small computer devices, like smartphones and laptops, save space by sending information over the internet to be stored on these Big Computers.
If all you wanted was a quick explanation, you’re done and you’re welcome. If you’re interested in learning more, this is actually a pretty cool topic that impacts your life way more than you realize, so it’s probably best to keep reading.
A Brief History of the Cloud
In the early days – and by that, I mean the 1960s – computers were giant, and predominantly kept in university buildings which you had to physically travel to if you wanted to use them. It was like a Cloud you had to access by foot. Over the next couple of decades, computers became smaller and cheaper, and the internet became bigger and cheaper, and if you were a big enough nerd, you could have a computer in your house with your information on it, and an internet connection to get information from other people’s computers.
Then in the 1990s, a guy named Tim Berners-Lee at a nuclear research center in Switzerland who had a lot of information to share with other researchers all around the world, said, “why is the internet so hard to use?” and invented the World Wide Web. (This is the type of internet you use when you open a web browser like Chrome or Safari). Suddenly, going on the internet was easy, and everyone could do it. This is also the point at which the word “cloud” (lowercase) entered the conversation. Internet providers used a little cloud symbol to represent stuff on the internet, as opposed to stuff on your personal computer.
Yes, I paraphrased a lot. Obviously, there was a lot more going on in this time, and if you’re interested, I encourage you to look it up. (Or you can wait until I explain to my grandma how the internet works and then write a blog post about it.) But for a modern understanding of the Cloud, the important part is what comes next.
The Big Three
In the 2000s, Amazon created Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short. Basically, they set up a Big Computer, and then started renting parts of it out by the minute. Amazon’s original goal was to rent to stores that wanted to set up online shops, making Amazon the “internet mall” in which the online stores lived. Their logic was that a shoe store, for example, would know a lot about shoes, but not about now how to set up a computer running 24 hours a day so people could buy shoes at any time from anywhere in the world. So instead, Amazon wanted to get paid to keep the computer running for them.
However, Amazon quickly realized that lots of other people, mostly software developers, also wanted the convenience of renting internet space in Amazon’s professionally built Big Computer, instead of having to build their own amateur Medium Computer in their basement. Since then, AWS has expanded, and now offers over 200 services for developers to do stuff like run websites, save information, build AIs, and much more. AWS is still the biggest Cloud provider in the world: they provide one third of all Big Computers your phone stores your cute kitten videos on.
The second big Cloud player joined in about four years later, which is a long time in a field where textbooks become obsolete approximately four hours after printing. In 2010, Microsoft set up their own Cloud to compete with AWS. It’s called Microsoft Azure, and it currently controls one fifth of the Cloud market. And then the year after that, Google made their own AWS knock-off, called Google Cloud Platform, or GCP, which still lags behind with only one tenth of the market.
The Modern Cloud
At this point, there’s a couple of different ways to use the Cloud we need to distinguish between. There’s many more, but below are the main ones that affect you.
What AWS, Azure and GCP sell is known as Iaas, or Infrastructure-as-a-service. It’s the computer equivalent of renting out an unfurnished house. They take care of the electricity and the plumbing, but you need to bring your own couch and dishes. In this metaphor, your custom application, like a website, is the dishes.
If you want the fully furnished version of the Cloud, you’re looking for Saas, or Software-as-a-service. Probably the most famous example of this is Netflix. They set up a Big Computer with a bunch of movies stored on it, and now they sell access to it, along with a video player and some recommendation lists they put together from watching your behavior. Which they can do because every time you watch something on Netflix, you need to reach into their Big Computer, and they are allowed to see when and how that happens, and what you do there.
Other examples of Saas are Gmail and Apple’s iCloud. These aren’t just blank computers you’re paying for. They’re finished, polished applications that let you check your email, organize your pictures, share spreadsheets, and so on. In the past, you would have had to install them on your computer. Now they run on the Cloud.
In the past decade, Cloud has taken over more and more of the things we do on computers. Software developers started to realize how much cool stuff they could build when they weren’t limited by little problems like your computer running out of space, and freezing and crashing. Cloud can handle what your devices can’t, leaving your smartphone to act as a simple portal.
It all culminated with the Covid pandemic lockdowns, when people couldn’t even reach their office computers, and stuff needed to be shared over the internet, which is exactly what Cloud is good for.
Where Are We Now?
So to recap, the actual Big Computers are mostly managed by three big comapnies: Amazon with AWS (32% market share), Microsoft with Azure (20%) and Google with GCP (9%). Those of you who are good at math will realize that’s only 61% of the market. There’s lots of other Cloud providers out there – Alibaba, IBM, Oracle, and more. And the competition is fierce. But the Big Three are the ones we need to keep an eye on.
Then there’s a crazy number of services that run on the Cloud which you can use directly: Netflix, Facebook, Amazon shopping, and thousands more. These are all ready-to-use services that run on the Big Computers – whose Big Computers? The very same ones we mentioned above. Take Netflix. Their movies are on, you guessed it: AWS. Netflix used to have their own machines, but in 2016, they decided that doing it on their own was getting too complicated. They’re a movie company, not a Big Computer company. so now they rent from AWS instead.
The Silver Linings
With most technologies, you only hear about the bad stuff. Social media is making us depressed, blockchain is a scam, AI is going to end the world, and so on. The Cloud is no exception. And obviously, there are major problems with the current state of Cloud.
But first, let’s take a moment to talk about the good stuff. There’s a lot of reasons why Cloud is so popular.
Storage space
This one is pretty obvious – the huge amount of files, emails, photos, videos and TV shows out there simply does not fit on our phones. If you want to have access to Beethoven’s entire Spotify catalog at a moment’s notice, the Cloud isn’t just nice – it’s necessary. In fact, a lot of the new tech that came out in the past fifteen years – smartphone applications and social media and streaming and even AI – would have been, if not impossible, then at least extremely difficult, without the Cloud.
Sharing
Cloud also give us the ability to easily share information online, something we do thoughtlessly everyday when we post Youtube video links to the Whatsapp group chat. Youtube is on Google’s GCP Cloud. Whatsapp used to run on IBM’s Cloud, but was moved to Facebook’s private Cloud (yes, those exist too) when they got bought by Facebook. If we want to share a video, we no longer need to send the actual video anywhere. We just tell the person we’re sharing it with where to find in on the Cloud, using a link.
Backups
Less than ten years ago, it was still common practice to regularly back up your computer to an external hard device, like a CD or USB key. Nowadays, if your phone falls into the toilet, you get a new one, log into your Google Photos and Instagram account, and boom, you’re back. With Cloud, you will never lose your data again (cue evil laugh). Seriously. You will never be able to lose it again. Cloud is a big contributor to the whole “the internet is forever” thing.
Critical Infrastructure
Which brings us to quite possibly the greatest benefit of Cloud yet. Private citizens aren’t the only ones who no longer need to worry about losing their data.
Up until Cloud, companies and public services, including banks, hospitals and energy companies, ran their own Medium Computers in their basements. These machines were often quite old, insecure and badly maintained, hospitals being expected to deal with patients, not computers. This left institutions vulnerable to technical issues and hackers, like in 2017, when a cyberattack locked 30% of British hospitals out of their computers and held their medical files for ransom.
Now that these organizations have started switching to the Cloud, their data is (hopefully) safer and harder to lose or tamper with. In fact, in many countries, Cloud centers are starting to be considered critical infrastructure – the kind that would receive emergency status during a power outage or war. What’s for sure is that at this point, if the Cloud goes down, a lot of things we rely on are also going to stop working.
The Dark Side
This means it’s time to talk about the dark side of Cloud.
Centralization
There is a saying about the danger of putting all your eggs in one basket. Currently, with Cloud, our data is in only about 3 or 4 baskets. When one of them goes down, a lot of eggs break.
Let’s talk about Fastly.
Fastly is a Cloud service company that helps move data between the Big Computers and your phone. On June 8th, 2021 at 6am ET, they started having problems due to a change in their system they had made a month before (Cloud infrastructure is complicated, okay?). During the 49 minutes the problem took to fix, people were unable to access Paypal, Square, Reddit, Etsy, Target, CNN’s website, the Guardian’s website, the White House website, the U.K. government website, and thousands of other online services. And this was a relatively short outage.
Microsoft spent June 2023 fighting off a hacker group who targeted their Azure Cloud with a series of DDoS attacks. (DDoS stands for Distributed-Denial-of-Service: it means the hackers pretended to be millions of users all accessing the Big Computer at once until it got overwhelmed and shut down.) Over the course of several weeks, the hackers managed at various times to take down Microsoft’s OneDrive file system, Outlook email and even the Microsoft Teams chat service, disrupting the work of millions of people around the world.
Although the internet is designed to be very resistant and difficult to take down, Cloud has concentrated a lot of internet services we’ve come to rely on in just a few points, making them vulnerable to outages and attacks.
Latency (Speed)
Let’s say you’re in South Africa. Your Google Photos, however, might be on a Big Computer in California. It’s easy to forget, but even for the internet, geography still matters. Accessing your data over distances like that can be slow, much slower than if you had it on your phone to start with. This has been fixed to some extent by Cloud providers setting up Big Computers all over the world, and companies like Fastly moving stuff around to be as close to you as possible. Still, we’ve all experienced the occasional frustration of a funny video stalling and failing to load over and over again.
Energy
Also, let’s talk about the electricity used by theses machines. These Big Computers (actually, if you look at them, they are more like hundreds of small connected computers), are extremely energy intensive. It’s estimated that by 2030, Cloud centers will use 8% of all generated electricity. And not only do they need power to run, they also need power to cool down. Imagine the laptop warming up your lap, and multiple that heat by several thousand. Cloud computers run so hot they need their own air conditioners. On a more positive note, there are also projects to use this heat to warm houses.
Cost
Oh, and they’re expensive. Netflix is projected to give Amazon more than a billion dollars this year for the space they rent on AWS. Granted, Netflix is AWS’s biggest customer, but running and maintaining Big Computers all around the world isn’t cheap.
Privacy
Speaking of making money, let’s talk about the other way Cloud providers do that. Companies like Google and Facebook make most of their money off targeted advertising, and that targeting is done with the data you leave behind on their Cloud. Did you notice that you spent a full fifteen seconds looking at your friend Brenda’s Facebook post of her vacation photos in Hawaii? Facebook noticed. Prepare to see some ads about beach vacations.
And as more internet services move to the Cloud, the harder it becomes to keep your online activity, and by extension your life, private. Here is a funny and terrifying story about how grocery chain Target compiled the data they collected on millions of customers, figured out a pattern of purchases among pregnant women, and then sent coupons for diapers to a teenage girl who had been trying to keep her pregnancy a secret. If privacy is dead, then Cloud is at the very least an accessory to its murder.
The Recap
So there you have it. Cloud is a Big Computer which websites, companies and your devices use to store information and run stuff. It’s great, because now you can have more photos than you have space for on your phone, or run applications that use more juice than your laptop can handle. You can access your data from anywhere and share it with anyone. But remember, you’re also sharing it with the Cloud.
And the Cloud is just someone else’s computer.
