Big data centers, ubiquity, a promise of endless expansions and lack of fronteers… but what is really about the cloud?

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which, scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities, are delivered as a service using Internet Technologies.

Gartner Glossary

More or less, we all have an idea of what Cloud Computing is supposed to be. A stack of technologies that gives you incredible power. I can write about cloud and you may start thinking about hyperscalers like Amazon AWS, Windows Azure, Google GCP. With related massive data centers growing bigger and bigger.

But, really, talking about Cloud Computing, what are we discussing about? At the end, Cloud Computing is born much earlier than these big actors. And technologies behind it are constantly evolving. Thinking on it, the same concept of cloud computing is not new at all. And one of its main characteristics is the ability to access information and functionality from any device, at any location.

Is this really a matter of technologies? Not really. The truth is that these technologies are not its essence. The cloud is a service or group of services. Part of the reasons for the name, cloud, is indeed coming from the fact that originally what was happening behind the scene was unknown for its users.

But we an imagine that this idea has evolved since its origin. To understand this evolution, we can go back to Gartner Glossary definition. Cloud computing is a style of computing in which, scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities, are delivered as a service using Internet Technologies.
This definition points to some of the key aspects of cloud computing:
Scalability, elasticity, delivered as a service over Internet.

Scalability aims at ramping up computing power and storage quickly, in contrast to limitations coming from traditional on-premise computing. Its promise, is that you will not need to order machines, assemble or operate them.

Elasticity instead points to the ability to scale in both ways. Once the resource is not needed any more, the system is able to scale down automatically.

And finally the Service Over Internet concept. Despite its definition is not well defined, we can highlights some of its expected characteristics. Resources are expected to be available at any time, and related provisioning something happening behind the scene. To be able to use cloud resources, the underlying infrastructure is expected to be robust enough to support provided services.
Users are not expected to rely on dedicated machines, instead they access elements coming from a shared pool.

Finally, customers are expected to pay only for what they use, avoiding to pay for machines standing idle in a data center.

Conclusion

This is just a simple introduction. But we have already seen that some of what seem to be defining characeristics of today’s cloud may be just temporary demonstrations of today’s architectures, or even its limitations ad hidden issues.

Cloud itself is not a technology, neither a set of technologies. It is a set of services, services that, to be delivered as is promised, need to come with several characteristis, that translate into algorithms and infrastructure, which complexity we may look more in detail in other articles.