Cloud has a body

'The cloud' is one of the best pieces of branding the tech industry has ever produced, and also one of the most misleading.

It sounds weightless. Soft, even. You upload a photo and it goes 'to the cloud,' like it's drifting off somewhere harmless above your head.

What it actually means is that your photo is sitting on a physical disk, in a physical building, cooled by physical air conditioning, powered by an actual electricity grid, on actual land that someone had to build on.

Every request you make online has to happen somewhere. Every model that gets trained, every video that gets streamed, every message that gets sent, it all resolves down to hardware sitting in a warehouse, using real water for cooling and real electricity to run.

We never see any of it, which is sort of the point of the abstraction, and also exactly what makes it easy to forget. 'Cloud' is a genuinely useful concept for a user. It's arguably too useful, because it hides the physical system underneath it almost completely.

I don't think this is a warning or a takedown of cloud computing, I use it constantly, I'm literally building products on top of it. I just think it's worth occasionally remembering that 'the cloud' has a body, and that body is somewhere real, plugged into a wall.