In the early days, a link between any two networking endpoints could be traced via direct physical connections. By 1982, it was already a complex diagram with only 100 nodes, which got even more complicated by 1998. Engineers needed an easy way to depict the seemingly cumbersome, boring and static wiring information. Therefore, they started picturing it as cloud which made perfect sense because:
- Like networks, they may come in any shape and size.
- We see what happens outside of the cloud but no idea what goes inside.
- As cloud can be made up of zillions of water droplets, a network can include a lot of computers/devices.
So, “the cloud” became a shorthand for saying “dude, this is way more complicated than you’re capable of understanding and we’re willing to try to draw, so it’s just a big cloud of stuff over there somewhere.” With the ingress of internet, the whole structure became even more complex to diagram but was getting simpler for end-users to learn and operate. That’s when the real “cloud” of today was born – which inferred that the technology would live in data centers owned by IT vendors while consumers would find answers to every trivia question in seconds or instantly contact colleagues on the other side of the world unnecessitating the need to undergo with nuances of application installation and maintenance.
Another interesting analogy is that if you think of the whole internet as sky, the term “cloud” is a great metaphor. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and any number of other companies have clouds of their own that float around in this open sky. To extend the metaphor even further, like a cloud is a dense group of water molecules, each “cloud” on the internet is essentially a bunch of servers in warehouses which constitute the infrastructure for some application or service.
This content was originally published for my TechTuesday’s initiative on LinkedIn.
