Not Your Average Cloud: A Manifesto of Potential

Grazed from Wired. Author: Nathan Toups.

Take a moment and look up. What you see is a sky we’ve been striving to understand for most of human civilization. Whether it’s the sun, moon, stars or clouds, we’ve been wondering: How does it all work? It was only recently that humans had a solid grasp of the observable universe. Cloud computing is a similarly tricky subject. Whether you feel that stormy weather affects it, roll your eyes at the much-abused marketing jargon, or you develop distributed web apps, rarely is a concept that is so important so misunderstood.

Understanding the cloud is important because of the potential power that comes with the knowledge. When you’re typing in your credit card number to a webpage do you ever stop and think about who exactly possesses the information afterwards? Most of us do not because of how commonplace the practice is within our culture. Black Friday online shopping this year reached a pinnacle milestone – $1.2 billion was spent, marking the first billion-dollar day in ecommerce history. If you were one of the people madly clicking “Add to Cart” that day, your orders were most likely processed through software that embraced modern cloud computing infrastructure…

“Most likely” turns into “definitely” if you were an Amazon user. What many people don’t know is Amazon functions not only as the largest online retailer but also pioneers cloud computing. AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a separate division of the company that builds and rents computing services (i.e. data base servers, application servers, etc.). Hourly rental allows it to be cost effective and flexible, allowing everyone from the corner bakery shop to industry behemoths to utilize it. AWS revolutionized infrastructure efficiency. For example: Pinterest went from 10 thousand users to 48 million in 3 years using their services…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/12/average-cloud-manifesto-potential/