How the World Got Wired · The Cloud

Other People’s Computers

You should know, before we go any further, what the phrase the cloud actually means. Because it is one of the most misleading phrases in the modern English language.

When you store your photos “in the cloud,” they do not exist in the sky. They are not floating, ethereal, distributed across the atmosphere. They are sitting on hard drives, in racks of computers, in specific buildings, in specific cities, owned by specific companies. The word cloud is marketing. The truer phrase — the one programmers sometimes use as a joke — is other people’s computers.

When you save a file “to the cloud,” what you mean is that you have copied the file to a computer that you do not own, in a building you have never been to, run by a company you may never have bought anything from directly. That company has agreed, in exchange for a small fee — or, more often, in exchange for serving you advertising — to keep your file safe and to give it back to you whenever you ask.

This is the thing AWS lets companies do. AWS owns the computers. Other companies — Netflix, Airbnb, Lyft, the New York Times, hundreds of thousands of others — rent space on those computers, by the minute. When you stream a Netflix movie, the video is being sent to you from one of Amazon’s buildings. Netflix doesn’t own that building. Netflix doesn’t own those computers. Netflix is renting them.

This is a strange arrangement, if you stop to think about it. Netflix is one of the largest companies in the entertainment world. It has hundreds of millions of subscribers. And it is using, to do its job, infrastructure owned by Amazon — a company that, in another part of itself, is one of Netflix’s biggest competitors. (Amazon also makes movies and television shows; it owns the Prime Video service.)

You might think this would worry Netflix. It does, sometimes. There has been steady talk, for a decade, of Netflix trying to move some of its work onto computers it owns directly, or onto other companies’ clouds. The work is enormous and expensive. Mostly, Netflix has stayed.

This pattern repeats across the internet. Companies have become dependent, in deep ways they cannot easily unwind, on a few cloud providers that they also, sometimes, compete with.

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