Cloud Services with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft
March 24th, 2010 · View Comments · amazon, cloud, google, microsoft, saas, services
I'm sick of seeing a picture of a cloud every time someone talks about "cloud services." So here's a picture of a T-Rex instead.
Clouds are big puffy white things that float in the sky. Some clouds look like little animal creatures. Other clouds just look like clouds. Sometimes water leaks out of them, and rain happens.
No, cloud computing has nothing to do with clouds, or anything in the sky for that matter. I think we just needed a new word beyond “Internet” and Web.” “Internet” is too geeky, and “Web” is too spidery. “Cloud” is vague and conveys something far away from us that we can’t quite grasp. Maybe clouds are just friendlier than spiderwebs. I’m not sure why “cloud” caught on so well, but the whole concept is essentially using other people’s computers to do our bidding via web services. These people charge us by the hour to use their computing power, and we rely on them to scale and not fail.
There are quite a few services available now, but the big three you should probably know about are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Amazon started the whole trend and offers the most wide array of services. Google offers one specific service for cloud hosting (although you can arguably say that almost every Google product is a “cloud service”), and Microsoft is the one getting the least attention, but their strength in the business world may end up making their services the most widely used.
Oh, Microsoft. For some reason, they have a history of making really bad commercials and promos. There’s something about them that makes them really good at making really bad videos. Some of them are so bad that they’re funny, while others just make you wonder who actually watches this stuff.