The Cloud is the New Personal Computer.

Ahhh!!! …Sentimentality

Remember when these were a thing?

This is not a revolutionary statement. It’s pretty standard at the moment. We all have email, iPhones, iPads, computers, and even iCloud accounts. I remember the day when, if you didn’t have enough storage on your computer, and you were tech-savvy then you had to actually replace the hard drive and if you weren’t then you would store things on floppy disks or Zip disks until you were forced to purchase a new computer. Or when we all had MP3 players that could store like 25 songs on it and then the iPod first came out and change the name of the game to listening to music on the go.

But!!!!

Fundamentally what is the iPod? It is literally a large hard drive with battery and a friendly user interface allowing you to choose the music you wanted to play. So the component that the iPod brings to the table for the end user is simply storage.

Now present-day with current internet speeds and streaming services, the need to have anything local goes away. Why? Why do I need to have that music file stored on my device if I can stream the same data to my device with out experiencing a lag?

For the average user, if they can't tell if they are streaming or playing it locally, how on earth are they going to understand that they are using a cloud?

The cloud changes the game for us without the user even knowing. Humans don’t just have a computer nor do we have that expectation. I Expect that I am going to be able to write a document on my computer and continue to do so on the go with my iPhone or iPad. This is nothing new, except for the concept that we might be using cloud services and not even know it. I can do a restore from backup in iCloud for my computer and phone, this makes devices disposable. This is also kind of the point. It fundamentally answers the question, why do I need to worry about my data if a device breaks. The answer, is you don’t...

The fact that we can be connected at any given moment of our waking lives is in essence the overall point of the article. The personal computer used to be the driving force behind being connected and now it’s merely a tool just like the phone or tablet.

If you want to build a website or web application you would use a cloud platform, which is no different than a corporate version of iCloud with additional features. That’s all fundamentally AWS is. Let's continue to run with our iCloud example. All of these applications are created and designed for Apple's customers' basic use. AWS has a concept of Serverless which is slightly more complex but fundamentally the same thing. It consists of AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway tied together to bring backend APIs to a website. It’s not exactly going to bring a whole lot of value to Apple’s general customer base but Pages Apple’s Document editor will.

Again this is mostly about understanding the customer base. The average user is going to want to write documents but they won’t need a serverless backend API. The average user is probably not even going to understand or care to even know what that is.

The more that technology advances, internet speeds increase, and the more compute capacity grows the less important local work matters. Take the Super Nintendo as an example. It requires that you have a disk that you insert before you play the game. Now we have steam which allows you to stream gameplay. the larger the bandwidth tunnels grow the less the compute, storage, and memory of personal devices depend on. All of our devices are turning into dumb thin clients and the cloud is becoming more real and relevant.

The concept of a hard drive in the pocket that plays music, the iPod is an easy concept to grasp. With the above stated, the concept of Serverless is not. However, if I were to restate serverless maybe I could make some headway. Rented compute capacity, or hosted servers that allow for remote use of their compute capacity. Take the concept of a renter in an apartment. They only live there during an agreed-upon timeframe. Serverless is no different, it is still using servers but only executes on an agreed-upon block of code for a limited window of time. This was such a frenzy when it was first introduced because most REST APIs fall within this category. This, in theory, could reinvent the internet and make it much cheaper. Lambda AWS’s serverless offering allows for the first million requests per month to be free. To show real numbers, anyone company could support 12 million requests a year completely free. That is a lot.

When the personal computer first came out it was the only device people had, all your music, files, pictures, documents, and work went on this single device. When the smartphone first came out it took a couple of years but the integrations between devices became more and more of a priority. Now, as long as my iPad is connected to the same wifi as my Mac I can drag my mouse from my Mac directly onto my iPad seamlessly. The title of this article is “The Cloud is the New Personal Computer.” and I mean it. My devices are simply the entry point to which I interact with my data but that is only possible because of the cloud.