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How not to use the word ‘cloud’
The word ‘cloud’ is great. Cloud and wind metaphors enrich poetry and scripture and set the scene in stories. Dark clouds ahead and all that.
In the Old Testament, the Lord comes riding down on a swift cloud from heaven (Isaiah 19, Exodus 34, Numbers 11). Or maybe in the New Testament, the voice comes bellowing from the clouds as in the fantastic story of the Transfiguration wherein Jesus suddenly summons down Elijah and Moses, waking up the dopey disciples from their slumber, and then Peter—clearly the dopiest of the dopey three—suggests laying out three tabernacles for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. BOOM! A big cloud engulfs them and the voice of God starts bellowing: don’t you see, you idiots? It’s me, God! I’m baaack! And this time it’s personal! (Luke 9:28-36 et al). Fantastic passage.
‘Cloud’ in the sense that computer people use it has become an obnoxious, ugly little piece of jargon. It doesn’t abstract away anything useful. It just allows business people, analysts and Web 2.0 types to mystify technology more.
The very metaphor of a cloud has become stale. Engineers have been using ‘cloud’ as a rough abstraction of the network or the Internet on diagrams. Fine. If we are going to reuse the metaphors of computer engineers, why not at least pick some of the cleverer or more interesting bits of engineer-speak? The point about the cloud metaphor as those diagrams use it is that they are abstracting away something essentially unimportant: the data is being transmitted over the ‘net, but in the diagram we are saying it is being processed in some interesting way before being sent through the cloud or after it gets there, something interesting is actually happening.
I mean, blimey, Wikipedia isn’t immune from this kind of idiocy.
Cloud platform services or “Platform as a Service (PaaS)” deliver a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service, often consuming cloud infrastructure and sustaining cloud applications.
I have read that sentence over and over again and I have no bloody clue what it is trying to actually say. A platform that is a service that is also a stack that consumes infrastructure and sustains applications? It is a perfect example of Orwell’s description: “phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”.
How is someone non-technical supposed to understand this garbage?
Simple: they aren’t. The whole point of it is to baffle. It is exactly like the financial ‘instruments’ that ruined our economy: the whole point of a credit default swap or a collateralized debt obligation is that nobody understands them except about three banker gurus. Everyone else just buys and sells them on the basis of authority.
Cloud jargon doesn’t help non-technical people because it is far too abstract. And it doesn’t help technical people because it is far too abstract. It is abstract in the wrong way: the abstraction makes it more confusing. If I explain to you what Gmail or Amazon EC2 is, you can kind of see what the costs and benefits of such a service might be. But if I just say “it’s in the cloud”, you are at a complete loss because the abstraction doesn’t actually tell you how or why the technology benefits you.
The closest translation into English I can find of the Wikipedia passage is something like:
Some services on the Internet allow you to run applications on them.
I’m not sure if this is what is actually being said. But that’s because it could mean any number of different things, and there’s no way to tell!
This kind of language infects everything. E-mail providers become cloud mail providers. Hosting services become clouds. Running servers in your own datacenter is running a “private cloud”. As Larry Ellison said, all you have to do is take the pitch you are giving to VCs and do a find-replace in Word for every mention of “Internet” or “Web” and change it to “cloud”.
I’ve found a bunch of services and concepts people like to refer to as ‘cloud’. Below I list a bunch of simple, easy, concrete ways to describe them so that people might actually understand what you are going on about.
- Gmail, Hotmail → “e-mail provider”
- Heroku → “Ruby application hosting service”
- Google App Engine → “Java and Python application hosting service”
- Dropbox, UbuntuOne → “file hosting and synchronization service”
- Google Docs, Zoho, Exchange Online/Office Communications Online → “online office suite”
- EC2, Azure or Rackspace Cloud → “on-demand hosted servers”
- SimpleDB, MongoHQ, SQL Azure, AppEngine’s datastore → “databases”
- Salesforce, NetSuite → “online CRM/business management application”
- “hybrid cloud” → “running some servers ourselves and having some of them run by someone else”
- “The Intercloud”1 → “The Internet”
- “netbook”, “cloudbook”, “cloud terminal” → “small laptop computer”
- “cloud engineering” → “engineering”
- “cloud backup and recovery” → “backup and recovery over the Internet”
- “cloud gaming” → “Internet-streamed video games” (or if you want to be cynical “moonshine”)
- “data cloud” → “Semantic Web” or one of the many other pointless rebrandings thereof
- “Cloud 2” → nothing. It means nothing at all. It’s just marketing.
Save a brain today: stop with the cloud bullshit.
