Sid Kumar

It must have been seven or eight years ago. Maybe ten. It doesn’t matter. I was talking to a non-tech colleague and the discussion shifted to moving servers to “the cloud”. Most of the world was unaware of the word “cloud” as a technology word.

He: “What happens when it rains?”

Me: Speechless

I explained that it is not the cloud in the sky. It is just that instead of running servers in your own datacentres you run them in a big shared datacentre. You can access these servers from anywhere. (For the tech minded this was the early IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service days).

He: Oh! So it is just your applications in someone else’s datacentre. But, why call it cloud?

Me: Speechless

I had no clue. I wondered too. Why cloud? Why not something else? Leaves? Tree? River? Sky? Why only cloud?

Seriously! Why confuse people? Why create another meaning for a well known simple word that even 2-3 year olds know? Atleast with Agile and agile we can distinguish it with uppercase and lowercase “a”. But, cloud? No.

There is a reason. It clicked after many days when I was drawing a network diagram. Connecting the network to the Internet. I drew a cloud shape figure. It was commonly accepted representation of Internet, or a separate network that you connect to. We just drew the cloud, never called it “the cloud”. It was like a black box. Vague. Amorphous. Didn’t need to know what’s behind. Aha!

So who started calling cloud, the cloud? There is a rumour that it was Compaq (later bought by HP). In mid to late 90’s Compaq (supposedly) had started using the term “cloud computing” in context of delivering compute services over a network. The credit for making it popular goes to AWS. They introduced Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.

Elastic! Absolutely. One could stretch the compute resources (CPU/Memory) and reduce it to its starting state on demand. Adhering to the simple definition of elastic. But cloud! C’mon. And don’t get me started on containers. Seriously, “containers”? Are we shipping software now?

And, here is Dilbert’s view…