Clearing up the "Cloud"

I have been promising and promising to have a true tech article that would really help people understand something that is "high tech" in real English...so here it is!  The Cloud...one of the most elusive terms in technology these days.  Some people have no idea what it is or means...others think they do but have the concept wrong or only know part of it...both of which are bad situations.  Well, it is time to set the record straight in as much English as I can...with a few examples to hopefully help people understand a little better.  No beer tonight...this requires clear thinking and decent literary skills...not to be read as it will be written even remotely grammatically correct :)  Also we will be using meteorological terms that have absolutely no official connection to any technology, but will help us "name" the types of technology clouds...and well I promised no gigabytes and megahertz...I said nothing about meteorological terms :)  


The way I like to describe it is in its most primitive format, the "cloud" is a web service hosted at a highly redundant and readily available datacenter that is accessible by anyone through an app or browser available on a multitude of different devices.  

Cloud 1.0 - Cirrus (high and wispy clouds capable of very little)

Many websites could be considered...I guess...individual "clouds".  They do follow the definition above as they are hosted elsewhere, redundant and readily available.  So take for example a website like www.myspace.com  
When it originated it was pretty simple...a system designed to allow people to host individual webpages for themselves  It didn't reach out to the web much, but was its own ecosystem developed that ran on its own servers that were hosted in a datacenter.  






Cloud 2.0 - Cumulus (mid level clouds that have potential to create some interesting weather and lightning)


One of the challenges of building a website today is the scalability of it.  This means, that if you come up with an idea or event that triggers HUGE public attraction all at the same time, the one computer that is running your website is definitely not going to be enough to serve all the information to the thousands of people that are requesting it at the same time.  This put businesses in a tough spot...they were forced to buy enough equipment to handle the maximum amount of traffic they could fathom they would ever need to handle.  The last thing you want is to have your website listed on the front page of yahoo.com and for your server to be overwhelmed leaving the potential viewers with a "timed out" page.  That being said, this was a very expensive proposition for  a once in a while situation.  Thus the Cloud 2.0 was born...elastic computing.  Exactly...just what we needed...computing that could shrink and expand to our needs.  Amazon has an elastic cloud solution that is incredibly popular these days.  This type of "cloud" is usually only used by developers.  This is not something you would just go sign up for.  Business decision would be made to determine if there was the need for elastic computing to handle burst of user traffic and if so then services like Amazon would be considered.  Again, this still falls within the definition above:  it is a data center that is highly redundant and readily available on a multitude of devices. 


Cloud 3.0 - Mammatus (low level clouds that seem right in your face...looking very powerful)

So, we have basic websites in the "cloud".  These websites could be considered "applications" in a way.  Normally most people think of an application as something that you install on the computer.  But at its basic, an application is a piece of software used to accomplish a specific task.  Myspace for example is a piece of "software" that allowed individuals to create and maintain their own personal website.  However, the more functional generic software is what more people think of...like Microsoft Outlook or Adobe Photoshop.  These applications were installed and run from your local machine.  This is great in so many ways, but really limiting in another.........what if you aren't at your machine?  The need to be able to perform the functions of these applications but in a way that accessible through the cloud was important.  So, we now have fully developed rich applications that reside in the "cloud" as opposed to on your machine.  Google Apps, Zoho Online Business Productivity Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com are all prime examples of where the "cloud" is now in its more advanced form.  It still follows all the basic rules as described above, but it is now delivering to the user applications that were originally designed to be installed locally on their machine.  This allows you access to the software ANYWHERE...not just on your machine.  There are about a zillion reasons why this is good and still quite a few why it is bad, the numbers are growing in its favor.   

I am not really sure if I have done much good here describing this.  I hope that I have managed to clear up in some manner what people's understand of the "cloud" is.  It is more than just the iCloud (which btw is very primitive and is late to the game).  It is something that should be embraced and not feared because it is unknown.  It is definitely not a single thing and is unfortunately a flexible term in a world of technology that is usually 0's and 1's...not subjective.