Is your head in the cloud?

These days, if you try to google the word “cloud” you’re more likely to get articles referencing “cloud computing” than you are finding a reference to the weather. It turns out that the Cloud isn’t even a new concept, but media embraced this terminology and is using it excessively. So, what exactly is the Cloud? How did we start using it and what are the design principles that lead to the concept of Cloud computing? Cloud computing has been one of those buzz words in both consumer and enterprise technology, especially over the last few years. Companies seem to use this term to attract more customers and to show that they are “in” with the latest technology that there is. But how much of it is real and how much is just a lot of hype? The cloud is an example of a buzzword taking over the concepts that were established and used since the 1960s. We will take a look at the history of cloud computing, it’s architecture and design principles, how it is changing the ways that we access, compute and store information using the Internet and what are some of the implications of using a cloud-based system?

Think about different activities that you did today that required you to use the Internet. Did you catch up with your emails? Did you check Facebook or Twitter and interact with your friends? Or did you just watch a movie on Netflix, or listen to some music on Spotify? If you did any of these activities (or all) you have used the benefits of Cloud computing. When we’re referring to the Cloud, in a way, we’re referring to the Internet. In a broad sense, the internet is a worldwide network of billions of devices that communicate with each-other. The term “Cloud” began as an intentional, “black box” metaphor in network engineering for the distributed network connections for the Internet and Ethernet (1960s-70s). The term was a way of removing the complexity of connections and operations (which can be any number of configured TCP/IP connection in routers and subnetworks) between end-to-end data links. Now the term applies to the many complex layers, levels, and modules designed into online data systems mostly at the server side. The whole “server side” is “virtualized” across hundred and thousands of fiber-optic linked physical computers, memory components, and software modules, all of which are designed to create an end product (what is delivered and viewed on screens and heard through audio outputs) that seems like a whole, unified package to “end users.”

Many people think of the cloud as a collection of technologies. It’s true that there is a set of common technologies that typically make up a cloud environment, but these technologies are not the essence of the cloud. The cloud is actually a service or group of services. This is partially the reason that the cloud has been so hard to define.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shares the technical definition as:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Cloud computing provides different services based on three delivery configurations. When they are arranged in a pyramid structure, they are in the order of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

1. SaaS or Software-as-a-Service — This is the layer the end-users face and it provides the functionality these users demand: social media communication, collaboration on documents, catching a taxi or booking a room for a night. This layer offers a limited set of functionalities and literally no control over the computing resources. Nevertheless, the end users get what they came for — functionality.

2. PaaS or Platform-as-a-Service — an underlying level of APIs and engines allowing the developers to run their apps. This is a layer where the AWS or Azure users leverage the platform functions (like the latest batch of tech AWS introduced during their re: Invent week 2017). This level of the cloud pyramid allows the developers configure the resources needed to run their apps within the limits set by the cloud platform. This level demands to have some understanding of the processes and structure of your cloud, at least to be able to tick the appropriate boxes in the dashboard of said cloud service provider (CSP).

3. IaaS or Infrastructure-as-a-Service — the lowest level of the cloud services, where the DevOps engineers work with the tools like Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes to provision the servers and configure the infrastructures, processes, and environments, enabling the developers to deploy their software, APIs, and services. This layer might work with the hardware provided by cloud service providers like AWS or GCP or with on-prem bare metal Kubernetes clusters running in private or hybrid clouds. This level provides the most capabilities (like load balancing, backups, versioning and restoration of an immutable infrastructure) yet requires the most skills to be operated correctly.

Cloud computing is present in many aspects of our daily lives as we utilize internet for work, school, and personal life. We check emails, post on social media, share documents via online file sharing services, stream hours and hours of videos, and use cloud-based car navigation apps. Even though the media uses the Cloud as a buzzword, referring to a new technology, we need to keep in mind that the concept of cloud computing was firstly used in the 1960s, with the development of mainframe computers, accessed by dump terminals.

Cloud computing changed the way that we access, compute and store information via Internet. Cloud computing as a technology is still evolving and there are some major concerns in terms of privacy and security, but cloud computing adds a lot of value as a solution for several IT requirements.