By: Kavindra Sharma, Head - Consulting

The world seems to be talking about Clouds these days. During the monsoon season, Indian peninsula is all covered with thick, heavy and sometimes dark clouds. Cloud bursts always hit the headlines, making a villain out of clouds.
It is well accepted tha​​t Water is the source of Life on planet earth. So, we search for water on other planets, and generally believe that finding water will take us closer to finding Life there. Water is abundant, yet very unique, and has many distinguished physical and chemical properties without which Industrialization would have not have happened. In solidified form (ice), it floats on itself – a truly unique phenomenon. If Ice did not float, the Life of earth would not have existed or evolved, at least the way it is now!

But more fundamental and ‘primary’ source of Life is Sun – obviously. And Cloud is the result of Sun working on Water. Without the phenomenon of cloud creation and rain, water itself would have been pretty useless and would have been permanently stored only in oceans. No rivers, no snow peaked mountains, no lakes, no underground water – nothing would have been possible without rain coming from clouds. Cloud is a natural carrier and distributor of water around earth in a very systematic and rhythmic manner that rejuvenates Life. It wades its way through Sky where wind and pressure differences govern its path. Predicting its path and resulting rain is hardest science where largest supercomputers are always at work. Rives complete the cycle by carrying the collected water back into the oceans. The river water ‘recharges’ or ‘refreshes’ oceans in some sense.

The above science of ‘water cycle’ is known to perhaps all primary school kids, but I mainly narrated it to myself to understand some fundas of “Cloud Computing”. Having revisited the significance of Cloud in the scheme of things for Life and Planet earth, I certainly feel that the term Cloud Computing is very apt. It takes computing resources lying in few large server farms (oceans), and distributes it, or makes it available in consumable form to the civilization. Computing resources are hardware, system software and application software of all sorts. Civilization consumes these resources and produces more similar resources and contributes them back to the ocean in the form of making new functionality hosted on some Cloud. Thus, the ocean gets ‘refreshed’ and ‘enriched’ by its consumption that happens mainly because of cloud. Internet is the common carrier and distributor of these computing resources and also acts as ‘collector’ to replenish the ocean.

The very nature of any Cloud – natural or computing, is Global. It cannot be a ‘confined’ phenomenon in a laboratory. We also hear some term called ‘Private Cloud’ which is some sort of contradiction in my view. It is like boiling water in a tea-pot and believing you are making clouds that will rain in your own backyard. The technology of Private Cloud is quite good and my friend/advisor calls it “Virtualization on Steroids”. But I feel the “Cloud” prefix should be reserved for things of truly global scale. Otherwise, we run the risk confusing kids, at least 🙂 I hear some reader saying “so it is not for you kids”, and I am OK with it.

A renowned Cloud Advisor and friend, tried explaining the genesis of term “Cloud computing”. Since early days of Internet, we always used to represent Internet with a picture (sketch) of cloud and various “systems” were shown connected to this cloud. That picture of cloud became synonymous with Internet, and basically Cloud Computing is Internet Computing. But calling it Internet Computing would have been so “technical”, hence it is called Cloud Computing.

Hats-off to whoever drew the first picture of Internet as Cloud. Any takers of credit?