The Planet Blog

Have you heard of “The Cloud”? It’s the end-all hosting solution that balances your checkbook, gives massages and keeps all the items in your kitchen cabinets alphabetized and sorted by size and category.

The term “cloud” has been around the block once or twice on the Internet – one of its first technological uses was a description of the Internet as a whole. Comparisons to “webs” or “series of tubes” have received a bit more fanfare, but the root of the metaphors is consistent: We need to be able to explain and visualize what this “Internet” thing is beyond bits and bytes and ones and zeroes.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: The Internet is everywhere and the Internet is nowhere.

The fact that we can’t point to anything tangible to define the Internet forces us to conceptualize an image that helps us understand how this paradox is possible. A lot of information is sitting around on servers somewhere out there, and when we connect to it, we have access to it all. Cloud, web, dump truck, tubes … It doesn’t matter what we call it because we’re not defining the mechanics, we’re defining the concepts.

A Cloud by Any Other Name

These days, the term “cloud” has made a resurgence in a different context: Because we’re more intimately familiar with the Internet these days, we’ve come to understand it in terms of servers and connections, but technology has forced us to break free from that interpretation as well … Instead of content being hosted on a single server somewhere, it’s theoretically floating around independent of all hardware. It’s like a grid of servers acting as one … or a cluster of servers … or cloud of servers on the Intercloud (I’m going to trademark that).

Breaking free from hardware limitations is huge. Cloud computing and cloud storage theoretically offer the ability to wave goodbye to those artificial processor and hard drive constraints and move toward a new, never-failing, infinitely scalable platform that cleans your room and pays your taxes. Wait. What?

-Kevin