Explaining the Cloud to Grandpa
Don't Worry, Be Happy
Grandpa says: What really zapped me in a way I’ve still not completely come to grips with is the extent to which the world of computers is much BIGGER THAN THE WORLD ITSELF. And I mean that literally. When you told me about this electronic phenomenon literally beyond this world thangy called THE CLOUD, I literally flipped. Really. The CLOUD is a world separate and apart from this one and inclusive of everything that goes on here. I actually can’t believe or grasp its “reach” and attendant magnitude. To think that this very correspondence will travel not just from (my house) to (your house) but millions of miles beyond that trek is truly unbelievable.
This is going to take a while.
The Cloud is to the computer what the Safeway warehouse is to the kitchen pantry.
Nobody expects that when you’re pouring yourself a bowl of cereal that you think about inventory systems, forklifts, logistics, supply chains, container ships and bills of lading. You just deal with the box in front of you. But if you start reading the fine print on the box, you realize that the corn flakes are put together by a corporation called Kellogg which has been operating over 110 years. It’s headquarters are in Michigan but there’s no corn grown there. They had 13 billion dollars of business last year and they make Rice Krispies and Pringles which they ship all over the world. There’s no rice or potatoes grown in Michigan. How do they do it? And what in the world is an Eggo? When you think that the cloud is some kind of special complication which is completely different than the rest of the Western civilization, you’re overthinking it in the wrong direction. So let’s apply some of that fear to Kellogg.
Suddenly you realize that there are people from Kellogg who get rice and potatoes and corn from wherever that comes from, then they crunch it into shape using processes you’ll never understand and manage to get it into warehouses they control all over the planet. Is there any place in the world where you cannot get Frosted Flakes? How long have we been listening to Tony the Tiger?
I only bring this up to illustrate that you have no more reason to trust the people who work at Kellogg or Proctor & Gamble or the Port of Long Beach than the people at Amazon or Google. Who is in charge? Who indeed? Who lets you know that the rice in Rice Krispies is actually rice?
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Ironically it is the largeness of cereal that helps us trust it. What is the impact of one foul corn farmer in the corn flake supply chain? If one of the thousands of pig farmers decide to feed glass to their pigs what is the chance that it gets into your bacon?
The cloud is computers. A bunch of them networked together, so that if one of them fails, then another one takes over. It’s the direct opposite of HAL in 2001: A Space Odessey. That was one single machine. When it failed, the whole mission went pear shaped. Nobody would architect anything like that today. It’s called a bottleneck or a single point of failure.
When you take a picture from your ordinary PC or smartphone and store it in the cloud, it is automatically duplicated several times and spread out over multiple computers with multiple hard drives so that if one of them fails (which is inevitable), then a copy is still retained. But they still are all your picture belonging only to you. They’re just backed up. That’s a good thing.
If you have a hard time trusting that, then consider your telephone. There used to be a time when you couldn’t make a long distance phone call without the benefit of a human operator in the middle. They literally held the wires in their hands and stayed on the line to insure a good connection. After a time, they were automated out of the loop. So your own dial, or pushbutton could automate the process. Your phone has a separate conversation with the telephone company’s switching system. Dial tone means something. Ringing tone means something. Busy signal means something. Each beep of a touchtone button means something. That’s actually the computer language of telephony. It’s something the machine understands, and most people over the age of 30 understand it too. When you enter the number, you’re not talking to an operator, your phone is talking to a computer and that computer talks to others to ring the phone of the person (actually the phone) you are calling. That’s a cloud too. But you don’t think of it any more than you think of how the lumber store got the wood to sell to you to build the playhouse in your backyard. You don’t know where that wood came from. Why trust it? The phone company still knows every phone call you make and to whom you make it and how long you were on the line. If the police get a warrant, the phone company turns it over. Who is in charge?
Believe it or not, cloud providers like Amazon and Google take their infrastructure very seriously. The correctly believe that they are part of the backbone of our civilization. So while what they’re doing is very complex and mysterious at the consumer level, it is very strictly organized and disciplined at the industrial level. It is not haphazard and full of terrors, like the Callahan Dump Bridge in Siskiyou County built in 1914. But that doesn’t change the perception of consumers. You have no more reason to trust the cloud than you have to trust the phone company, the electric company or Kellogg’s. They are all ultimately businesses run by people under the laws and conventions of the USA, with agreements that are international as well.
But down to brass tacks, Grandpa, your email does not go a million miles through all of the clouds from your house to my house. There is no good reason for the inventors of email to make its protocol take the longest possible route from your house to mine. Their incentive was to use as few computers and wires as possible and thereby reduce their own electricity bill and reduce the number of times they have to call Scotty to crawl behind the mainframe and fix what’s busted. Similarly, the folks who run the cloud want to make their job as headache free as possible. They want to talk to actual customers as little as possible, which means they will automate as much as possible. That makes them the exact opposite of sleazy auto mechanics. They want to set things up once and never have to think about it again. Programmers want their stuff to run perfectly the same way billions of times.
Email hasn’t been perfected but you might notice that it’s essentially free. There’s a flat rate your internet service provider charges and you get unlimited emails. Maybe you can remember back in the days before cell phones that you got a phone bill that told you every long distance phone call you made and how much it cost. We are actually living in a better future, and long distance charges are one less thing to worry about.
Unless you feel that you must worry, not trust it and demand to know who is in charge. That’s another conversation.