Though its name suggests something inherently nebulous and ephemeral, the cloud doesn't have to be something that is hard to grasp.

The term ‘cloud computing’ first emerged in the 1990s at the dawn of its commercial debut; however, the technology it refers to had been theorized and implemented on a smaller scale for decades prior. While its current name does little in the way of describing the technology, unnecessarily mystifies it, and suggests something inherently nebulous – if you take a brief look at its history, you’ll see that it doesn’t have to be that hard to understand.

If you look up ‘the cloud’ in a search engine, you will find explanations ranging from the very straightforward (albeit techy) to the excessively creative. Some of the best ones are found on the websites of two companies that made their fortune off of cloud services: Amazon and Google.

Amazon’s explanation states:

“Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).”

Google’s is very similar:

“Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources (such as storage and infrastructure), as services over the internet. It eliminates the need for individuals and businesses to self-manage physical resources themselves, and only pay for what they use.”

Though these descriptions should make more sense at the end of the article, the terminology still muddies the water for most people. To overcome this issue, we need to look at what this technological system was called before it became ‘the cloud.’

The concept behind cloud computing predated the Internet, with a salient example dating back to a 1961 speech by MIT computer scientist John McCarthy (one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence). In his speech, he famously said “Computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility.” This system of computing was referred to as “utility computing.”

This name is much more descriptive of the technology it denotes, so it can help you to envision it a bit more accurately. The ‘cloud’ is simply a system of computing as a utility, it’s no more magical than tap water and it is no less physical or stable than the power grid or gas lines.

If we return to Google and Amazon’s descriptions of cloud computing, and put them in an analogy with the power grid, it should bring it down to earth:

The cloud delivers computing resources over the internet, just like the power grid delivers electricity over the power lines. The cloud eliminates the need for businesses and individuals to buy, own and maintain their own computing resources, just like the power grid eliminates the need for them to run their own power plant on-site. Cloud users are charged on an as-needed basis, only paying for what they use, just like the power company bills customers based on wattage; and because of this flexibility, it’s much easier to scale up.

It's as simple as that.

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