There are lots of conflicting definitions of The Cloud out there, and the debate as to what exactly is The Cloud rages (Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and top contender for super villain has a great rant on the subject here). To be honest, I had no clue what the cloud was, until I was hit with a moment of inspiration: There are two aspects of technology anyone working with it is concerned with (ala the upcoming CBS Sitcom #@!$ My Dad Says): Shit I Care About ™, and Shit I Don’t Care About ™. It’s the stuff you’re responsible for, versus the stuff someone else is responsible for.
When using Visio to do a network diagram, there is almost always the ubiquitous cloud icon. The cloud represents the rest of the Internet typically, with no detail other than “The Internet”. The Internet is of course a ton of detail. Routing protocols, IP packets, WAN links, interconnects, hundreds of thousands of network devices making sure IP traffic gets from point A to point B.
But unless you’re a network administrator, you don’t care. And even if you are a network administrator, you only care about your little piece of the Internet. The rest of it is there, but it’s someone else’s responsibility to make sure it works. You don’t need to concern yourself with the details. The Internet is a cloud, full of Shit You Don’t Care About.
Technology in a way is a continual process of making more and more of the technical world Shit I Don’t Care About. A few decades ago, programmers needed to know machine language to get anything done. This gave rise to assembly language, and that begat C and other low level languages, to Java, PHP, and Perl. Each step up abstracts more and more of the base technology. Perl and PHP, for instance, turn memory pointers into Shit I Don’t Care About anymore.
Arthur C. Clarke, a novelist known for his incredible insight into technology’s affect on the future (he proposed the idea of geosynchronous orbit satellites, have you heard of them?) mention this phenomenon in his book 3001: The Final Odyssey. In the book, the chief engineer of the inter-planetary vessel Goliath can’t explain to the to protagonist Frank Poole much about the inner workings of the ship (Scottie would be appalled!). The evolution of space craft had made them so incredibly complex (and automated) that only the basic operation needed to be (or could be) understood by its operators.
The iPad and the newest generation of smartphones are devices that transition a layer of Shit I Care About into the realm of Shit I Don’t Care About: Namly the desktop, drivers, and the concept of a PC desktop.
So that’s what The Cloud is; it’s Shit I Don’t Care About. There’s some type of interface for interaction, (HTTP for web apps, APIs for data retrieval, etc.) and then there’s a bunch of shit behind the scenes that I don’t care about. Or at least, that’s my definition of The Cloud (among thousands of conflicting definitions).
For instance, does your website run Linux or Windows? Do your users care? Most likely not. They’re not going to interact with the OS, so why would they care? It’s Shit They Don’t Care About. Oracle or Microsoft SQL? Again, I don’t care. Just as I don’t care if the plane I’m flying on is an Airbus 320 or a Boeing 737.
So Cloud Computing is the act of transitioning infrastructure I used to care about into the realm of Shit I Don’t Care About. Servers, storage, networking, etc. If I can transition Shit I Care About into Shit I Don’t Care About, I can concentrate on some New Shit.
Cloud Computing is transitioning Shit I Care About into Shit I Don’t Care About so I can spend time on New Shit.
Genius!
what he said.