By Chris Miller from Cloud Brigade

Cloud is perhaps the most ambiguous term in technology today. Cloud refers to a wide range of internet technology and use cases, yet the term is thrown around as if everyone should understand the context in which it was used in a given moment. It reminds me of the Finnish comedian Ismo and his take on American’s ambiguous use of some words.

Regardless of whether or not you have a tech job, your everyday life is most certainly impacted by the cloud. You phone (smart or dumb) uses the cloud. Your navigation map uses the cloud. Your email, website, smart speaker, security camera, thermostat, they all use the cloud. Even if you still read a newspaper, all the content traversed the cloud before it was printed. Your shopping, shipping, banking, energy usage. Cloud.

The term Cloud became popular around 2006 when companies like Amazon and Google started using it to describe the way people would use software and access files, using an internet connection. In a way we’ve come full circle in that the first mainstream use of computers was in the “mainframe” era. With a mainframe people accessed all their information from a very large remote computer.

In the early internet days, Sun Microsystems used the tagline “the network is the computer”, referring to Sun “workstations” which worked in concert with and complemented supercomputers. Soon after, the Berkeley SETI Research Center needed more computing power than was available to them. They started the SETI@Home project and pioneered “distributed computing” by allowing internet users to volunteer their computers to be used to analyze radio signals, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

In the 1990s as companies started building “web based” software served via the internet, they had to buy industrial computers called “servers” and place them in special warehouses called “data centers” which had large internet connections and generators in case the power went out.  Although computers were getting more powerful and less expensive, servers on the other hand represented a large upfront expense which meant only those with sufficient capital could innovate on a large scale.

After the Dot-Com bubble burst, one company was weathering the storm quite well, a little ecommerce retailer called Amazon. As one version of the story goes, Amazon did most of its business during the holidays, and to keep up with demand they had to buy a lot of servers. During the rest of the year these computers sat idle, and they decided to make use of them by renting them out to other companies, much like the “time share” computers my parents used to tell me about.

As it turns out, that story was a myth. On Wednesday November 20th, Chris Miller from Cloud Brigade will be delivering a talk on Cloud 101. Chris will cover the remaining history of the cloud, and talk about what the cloud means to us today, but in terms that everyone can understand. Regardless of your knowledge level, Chris will also cover some topics in deeper technical detail and be available to answer any questions you may have about the cloud. If you are a Santa Cruz Works partner and don’t know how to use your $1000 in AWS credits, please consider attending this event so Chris can collect, compile, and provide suggestions.