What is the Cloud?

The first "modern" general-purpose computers, ENIAC and Colossus, were created in the 1940s. By the 1960s, computers were becoming more commonplace at larger institutions, but were still largely inaccessible to many professionals and researchers, let alone consumers.

This gave the illusion that each "terminal" was a personal computer running only their tasks, when in reality it was acting as a portal to a shared local computer. Before the internet was a concept, this marks the start of our exploration into the concept of the modern "cloud".

ARPANET, created in 1969, marks the creation of the long-distance Internet and implemented the same TCP/IP standards we use to this day. At the same time, IBM's CP-40 expanded upon time sharing to create virtualization – or dividing a single computer's hardware resources into multiple software environments. This allowed the creation of multiple secure and isolated server environments within a single physical hardware system.

By 1991, the modern internet as we know it was released to a world-wide consumer base. By paying an internet service provider, anyone could connect to the world wide web. Before the turn of the century the first theory of cloud computing is defined, creating a foundation for easily scalable server infrastructure.

This technology allows independent hardware systems to be linked together over a network and share their resources towards supporting a unified service. Distributed computing enabled websites to support a hundred thousand users by balancing the work load across server clusters instead trying to juggle everything on one server.

This allowed individual data centers to be spread across the globe. Whenever a service was accessed over the internet, the user could be geo-located and directed to the server that was closest to them. This provided a better connection quality, split up the workload and created more space for physical data storage.

While these technologies were groundbreaking for creating global internet platforms, they have had many impacts on privacy and technology development. This is because so many of these proprietary technologies have evolved behind closed doors without feedback from the communities that have come to rely on them.

By the early 2000s, technology companies had invested heavily into this infrastructure. In 2004, Google introduced Gmail, their cloud-based e-mail solution, with 1GB of free user storage. Amazon Web Services soon after introduced their "cloud" computing and storage services wherein you could remote rent server resources and storage space.

This enabled companies to forego hosting their own internal technology infrastructure within this building space and instead rely on an external contacted service. Dropbox was unveiled in 2007, offering 2GB of free cloud storage to everyone, by heavily utilitizing AWS cloud services.

Google introduces their Drive and Docs services in 2012, offering 5GB of free storage space to anyone who created an account. By 2013, this became 15GB shared across all of their services, demarcating the steady increase of technology companies marketing services towards everyday consumers. Companies predominantly rely on cloud services and this has forcibly positioned it as a consumer norm.

In the case of self-hosting, we are acting as the infrastrcture, platfom and software provider.

Leaky abstraction

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_abstraction

Cloud security

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing_security

You may lose access to your data at any point. Your service provider could decide they don't want to host your content.

https://www.wired.com/story/what-happens-when-a-romance-author-gets-locked-out-of-google-docs/

peer to peer and federation and fediverse

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(information_technology)