Cloud Services

The term “cloud” is closely related to the Internet. For a long time, in network diagrams the complexity of the Internet was reduced down to a simple cloud icon. That’s because the focus was on the servers, devices, and switches IT professionals were responsible for and the Internet was beyond the horizon of what they needed to worry about from an architecture standpoint. Since software delivered over the Internet similarly doesn’t require the customer to worry about how it’s architected, people began to refer to this software as being “in the cloud.”

Once at work, you use the cloud whether you write code using Github as a code repository, share a document with a colleague using Box, enter customer information into Salesforce, or onboard a new employee using Workday. When we go home, we may open up vacation photos a friend sent to us on Dropbox without giving it a second thought that we are consuming a cloud service built on top of another cloud service (Dropbox is built on Amazon AWS).