More and more people lately have been talking about “The Cloud”. Whether you’ve never heard of it or have heard it numerous times at work and are not quite sure why so many people are fascinated lately with the big white fluffy things in the sky, don’t worry. I’m here to fill you in on this marshmallow phenomenon. And for starters, it has nothing to do with the heavenly pillows that you watch go by overhead.
The most popular reference to “the cloud” is probably those (kinda lame) Microsoft commercials for Windows 7 where everyone’s solution (including April from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie) to their problems consists of going “to the cloud”. After you sit through those commercials, have you ever asked yourself, “What the heck are they talking about?”.
Well, basically they are talking about “cloud computing”, which is the idea that all of our information, computational power, software and data access services live in a big virtual cloud somewhere in the world, and we as general computer users / consumers have no need to know where it physically exists. We just know it works and our content is on the screen in front of us.
One example of a cloud system would be all of Google’s toys and services. If you use Gmail, Google Docs or any other services they provide, you are using a cloud system. None of your email or documents physically live on your computer. They all live in a computer datacenter somewhere in the world, but you don’t need to know anything about it. All you need to know is that your mail and documents are in front of you and you are able to read or write in them. The reason you can communicate with your email and documents in Google’s cloud is because of your Google account. When you login, all of your services and information are readily available and accessible by you.
Another (larger) cloud is the whole Internet. Everything we do on the web is floating around in cyberspace yet we can pull it in and access it from any computer. We don’t know where it physically lives, but we really don’t care. Just as long as it’s ready for us to access anytime we need it, we’re good to go.
And now that I think about it, those “To the Cloud” commercials don’t really make sense. What April was doing on her computer was basically editing the photos of her family on a desktop software application, which as far as I know has nothing to do with the cloud. Those photos could have been living on her computer in her home and not in some cloud. Oh well, that’s another discussion for another day.
For more details about the cloud, check out the definition for Cloud Computing on Wikipedia..
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Tags: Cloud Computing
