What is "The Cloud?"

What is the cloud? I'm going to make it really easy for you to understand it. For most people, there's only two types of cloud you need to worry about. Cloud storage or public cloud. And one thing I'll recommend is stop saying the cloud because it's not one place, it's many places. Most of us already use cloud storage even if we don't know about it. If you have an iPhone or an iPad or if you use a Mac, you use iCloud. If you have an Android phone or an Android tablet, you're going to use either Google Drive, Google Photos, that's Google's cloud. Or if you have a Samsung, you might use Samsung's cloud. Most people don't. Other types of cloud storage are like Dropbox and OneDrive. I'm sure you've heard of these at least once. These are all what's called cloud storage, where a copy lives on your device, that's your phone or your tablet or your computer, and a copy lives somewhere over the internet that you don't know where it is. That part where you don't know where it is is called the public cloud. And it's not one place, it's many, many places. So the internet runs on what's called virtual servers. And a virtual server is just as you would expect. It's a computer made completely out of software. So the hard drive isn't real. The CPU or the processor isn't real. The RAM isn't real. It's all made out of software to look like it's the real hardware. By hardware, I mean the real physical pieces that make up a computer. These are all software-based computers, and I'm going to show you what that looks like right now. So here on my Mac, I have a piece of software that lets me build virtual machines. Right here, I have two virtual machines, and we're going to be talking about this one first. I'm going to show you this virtual machine. Like I said, it has virtual hardware. So it has three CPUs given to it. It has four gigabytes of RAM given to it. It has a network card so it can talk to the internet. It has a USB driver and a CD-ROM plugged into it, and it has a hard drive. This is all made out of software. And now we're going to start this computer so you can see it run. Now the computer started up, it's running, and it's working. And if I want to, I can get on the internet. Just like that, I'm on the internet. If I want to browse files, it has a file manager, and it has everything that you would expect on a real computer, except the entire computer is made out of software. Now the internet doesn't run on computers like this. I'll show you what that looks like. Now the computers that run the internet look a lot like this, where it's just the computer running in the background. There's nothing to click with the mouse. There's nothing to interact with like you're used to on a computer. It's just sort of like the brain behind the computer. And if you want to do anything on it, you have to type it in there and run commands. That command, I just installed a small piece of software, but you don't really need to understand that. But this is what most of the internet looks like from inside each of those virtual computers that runs everything. Now here's what it looks like from the outside. If you were to go to one of these places and just walk around one of these places in the cloud, this is what it looks like. These are rows and rows of computers. And each one of those racks, each one of those blades is a computer inside of it. Those entire racks have multiple, multiple computers all running. That is what the cloud looks like. The public cloud looks like those computers. So if you ever hear someone say it's someone else's computer, it's not someone else's computer per se. It's a company's row of computers that all work together at the same time. And that's all the public cloud really is. Is all these different computers running in the background, making your websites and your apps work without you having to worry about it. And it's not connected directly to your house or your phone. There's many little network devices in between your house and those websites or those apps you're going to that sort of talk together. And what happened on Monday was not one of these computers going down. It was a little program inside of one of these computers that took down all those other computers. And that was sort of a big, unusual thing that doesn't happen. It's the first time something like that has ever happened. But to understand what the cloud is, when people say the cloud, they're talking about those computers in a big data center somewhere. And in this case, on Monday, those computers were in Ashburn, Virginia. I hope that clears up what the cloud is. If you have any more questions, I'm happy to answer them.