What Is “THE CLOUD”?

Well, as you've noticed by now, this is a different kind of book about the cloud.

I've been building cloud applications for quite a few years, and I still have trouble explaining to my friends and family exactly what it is I do. In fact, a couple of years ago I realized that I had just kind of given up.

Sample conversation:

• A NORMAL PERSON: “So what do you do for work?”
• ME: “Gargle, gargle.”

This is not because the cloud is so complex and mysterious. Doctors and scientists don't have trouble saying, “I'm a doctor or a scientist,” and their jobs are a lot harder and stranger than mine. I think I just got into my own head.

But I also know I'm not alone. There's a whole industry full of smart and accomplished cloud professionals gargling their way through the dinner parties they totally get invited to, because they never learned the tools to explain what they do. Their fancy computer science degrees taught them to balance binary search trees and negotiate the Border Gateway Protocol but not how to say “I write programs that run on someone else's computers.”

And really, the larger problem is abstraction. It can be hard to explain the building blocks of the cloud because the concepts don't relate to anything in the physical world. We all have some intuitive understanding of why a doctor exists. What exactly does a “cloud architect” build, and why does it matter?

The best way I can think of to explain is to draw a bunch of cartoons.

So I made this book for techie people like me to give to their non-techie friends. Or their children. Or their CEOs. Or just to keep on their desks. No shame in that.

I've tried to write from the perspective of someone who is new to the idea of “the cloud,” beyond a vague understanding that your iPhone stores its pictures there. I hope that by the last page, you will have not only a better understanding of the ways in which cloud affects you as an ordinary consumer but also a broad grasp of how cloud systems are designed, built, and maintained—you know, the work that my colleagues and I are so congenitally unable to explain.

(Side note: Do you know how hard it is to write hundreds of rhymes about the cloud? Of course you don't; you're much too smart to try that. I'm regretting it already, so please be kind.)

These little “Word to the Nerd” sections at the end of each chapter are totally optional. I'll do my best to keep them interesting, but they're mainly here for context and to make this book look slightly less like the product of sugar-fueled madness that it is. You can get all the important stuff just from the rhymes and pictures. And I hope you will.

See, the thing is, I love the cloud. I want everyone else to see it the way I do: As a Rube Goldberg machine made out of millions of tiny tubes. As the survivor of decades of cutthroat evolution, red in Bluetooth and claw. As a magic show, a Dr. Seuss fable, or sometimes even a gothic horror story or a bank heist.

I want the cloud to take its place where it belongs: in your imagination, as filled with wonder and possibility as any field of endeavor mankind has yet created.

Shall we begin?