Unless you’ve been hiding under the technological rock the past couple of years, you would’ve heard of the term cloud computing, or simply, the cloud. Yes, sadly, it’s another everyday word usurped by techies – akin to bug and spam.
Cloud computing is not a product. It’s a concept. It means that the data and data processing that you’re doing on your device is actually happening somewhere else. It’s a concept similar to computing in the days of mainframes and dumb terminals. Say what?!
Okay, imagine that you’re on your couch at home. You’re on your tablet looking at your Facebook news feed. You see an interesting post from your friend – a nice sunset in the Maldives where he’s spending the summer. You reply to this post with a picture of a rainy day outside your window. This simple interaction between you and your friend was made possible by cloud computing.
You see, the device that you’re using – regardless of whether it’s a PC, smartphone, or tablet – has been relegated as a “client”. This is where you do a lot of your e-mailing, instant messaging, and social networking. The client that we use gives us an interface – a window to look at, buttons to click, boxes to type in, and colors and design that appeal to us.
What is not not apparent is that a lot of other things happen in the background. Things happen in machines we call “servers”. In the Facebook example above, the user will see the Facebook app on their phone or tablet, or will go to the Facebook site on their browsers. What users will almost never think of is that all of the information that we see, the messages that we send, and pictures that we post are actually sitting in or going to another machine that is out there – a machine that is invisible to us. We don’t know where the machine is, how it connects to us, and who keeps it running. These servers are responsible for our e-mails, status updates and pictures being stored and made available to people who we want to share them with. Without these servers, none of the activities we do in Facebook amount to anything. These servers are essentially the cloud.
I’m not aware at what point the client-server computing model was referred to as cloud computing. I have noticed, because of the work that I do as a systems analyst, that in presentations where computer system landscapes are shown, that the internet is often depicted as a cloud. Connected devices such as PCs, notebooks, servers, smartphones, and tables all connect to the internet – the cloud. Because of this, I can understand why the internet and the servers connected to it is called cloud computing. For most of us, we don’t really think of the servers and everything else that comprises the internet that the servers connect to. What’s important for most of us is the service that we use and the device we use to gain access to these services. Everything else is out there – out of sight, out of mind. Everything else is in the cloud.
