"The cloud" sounds like something natural, hanging over our heads. It's actually someone else's computer, in someone else's building, that you pay rent for. I explain who the three landlords of almost the entire internet are, and why every company, even the ones with the loudest names, wires them money every month.
When someone says an app "runs in the cloud", translate it literally: the app runs on someone else's computer, somewhere far away, that you reach over the internet. There's no fog, nothing in the air. There's a warehouse with air conditioners, rows of servers, and a guard at the door.
I picture it as a hotel for computers. Instead of building your own building, you book a room exactly as big as you need right now. You don't lay bricks, don't buy an air conditioner, don't call a repairman when the roof leaks. At the front desk you pay based on how many nights and how many rooms you used. The cloud works the same way. Except instead of nights, you pay for computing power.
The owners of almost this entire hotel business on the internet could sit at one negotiating table and still leave a chair empty. Amazon's division for renting out computers is called Amazon Web Services, or AWS. Microsoft's is called Azure. Google's is simply Google Cloud. These three chains hold most of the rooms where other people's software is checked in, worldwide.
Inside these hotels, the companies also opened a special wing for artificial intelligence. The difference is like renting a bare room where you haul in your own furniture and run your own internet cable, versus renting a room where the desk and the computer are already waiting for you, set up. Instead of renting bare computing power and installing a model yourself, you get a ready-made model, built right into the walls. At Amazon the wing is called Bedrock. At Google, Vertex AI. At Microsoft, Foundry. The names sound different, the service is the same: someone else's model, in someone else's room, behind your own front desk.
Why does everyone rent a room instead of building their own building? Because your own building costs a lot and takes years of experience: air conditioning, backup power, security, people who get up in the middle of the night when something breaks. Renting lets you take on more rooms when you have more guests, and give them up when you don't. You pay like you pay for electricity, not like a mortgage.
Slow down on the enthusiasm
The convenience of owning nothing has a price, and it's called dependence. If the front desk decides to raise the nightly rate, change the check-in terms, or just cut the power for a few hours, you have no backup plan, because you have no building of your own. I've seen it up close: a site goes down because a server in Ireland went down, and the site's owner doesn't even suspect they were checked in there. So when I read the next story about a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, I ask first who holds the keys to that room. Usually it turns out the company with the loud name out front is just a guest on the third floor.