There is NO CLOUD, just other people's computers.

While perusing Twitter, saw the following NO CLOUD picture and loved it.

Those that know me know that I'm not a fan of the phrase "The Cloud" and all the marketing brew ha ha that surrounds it. (Hearing the phrase frequently causes met to roll my eyes.) Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-cloud or anything like that. It's just that I think of the cloud differently than most people do. I quite literally think of the cloud as a collection of servers that someone must manage. Quite frequently, cloud systems are owned and managed by a different business. (Frequently for the implicit legal / contractual obligations for the separate business.)

Being a systems administrator, I see The Cloud as a collection of servers that host applications / services that I care about. So, naturally I immediately start thinking about how to administer / support what's running in the cloud. To me, the cloud is juts another server far, that may happen to be located half way around the world. At the end of the day, they are still server images that I must manage, somehow. (Even if it's buried multiple abstraction layers deep behind a web portal.) As you might guess, I don't view the cloud as the miracle that others, especially those in marketing, do. I certainly view it as an opportunity to embrace and utilize as necessary.

Part of my cynicism comes from the fact that I deal with people on a weekly basis that view the cloud as something magical that will solve all of their computing problem. Some believe this so much so that they say things like this:

We don't need to worry about (firewall) ports. It's going to be in the cloud, where it will just work.

As you might have guessed, this triple teared application involving Active GridLink to a multi-node Oracle RAC database ran into problems and we did indeed care about ports for firewalls.

So, I view the cloud as a good technology, which when used properly is part of an overall solution. ‐ Know the components and tools that you work with, and how to put them together for a larger overall solution that fits your needs. Even if that means you are running things on other people's computers.

Here is Mercè's (@mercemolist) tweet showing the stickers is below.