Cloud Atlas: How The Cloud Reshaped Human Life

Just about everything you interact with digitally is enabled by the cloud. Whether you’re doom-scrolling on Instagram, binge-watching on Netflix, ride-hailing on Uber, or downloading super-cool cloud podcasts (hint, hint) on Spotify, you’re using the cloud.

But most people don’t have any idea what the cloud is, where it came from, or what we, as a species, spend on it. Episode One of “Cloud Atlas” goes back to the birthplace of the cloud: a little digital bookstore called Amazon.com.

Including contributions from:

• Allan Vermeulen, who led the team that built the world's first web-based storage product, Amazon S3
• Matt Round, who led Amazon's personalization team — and made it such that the online store rearranges itself for every unique user

An easy way to understand what the early cloud did is to think of it like a public utility. The same way buildings depend on a common set of utilities — gas, electricity, and water — software projects depend on a common set of services: compute, storage, and database.

“Compute” refers to the power it takes to run the software.

“Storage” refers to the part of cloud computing most of us know about — web-based storage, as opposed to local storage options, like personal hard drives.

“Database” refers to information about the items in storage, and mechanisms for retrieving and delivering stored data to users.

To create the cloud, and to offer it as a public utility to other software companies, Amazon needed solutions for all three. And in the mid-late-2000s, that’s exactly what they built — unleashing an economic event of epic proportions: the software-as-a-service (SaaS) revolution.

• Allan Vermeulen, who led the team that built the world's first web-based storage product, Amazon S3
• Matt Round, who led Amazon's personalization team — and made it such that the online store rearranges itself for every unique user
• Michael Skok, founding partner of Underscore VC, and a major cloud investor
• Joe Kinsella, founder of CloudHealth Technologies
• Erik Peterson, co-founder and CTO of CloudZero, Inc.

For Amazon to survive, they needed the cloud. But they had to invent it — and creating the cloud meant overcoming obstacles fundamental to the nature of software development at the time.

The main obstacle was what developers lovingly referred to as “The Monolith.” In Monolith architecture, it was like all elements of a software system were plugged into the same outlet, and if you wanted to replace or update one, you had to unplug the whole thing — not a sustainable structure for the kind of global-scale business Amazon wanted to create.

In other words, to create the cloud, Amazon had to first reinvent the wheel — redefining standards for building and running software.

Including contributions from:

• Allan Vermeulen, who led the team that built the world's first web-based storage product, Amazon S3
• Michael Skok, founding partner of Underscore VC, and a major cloud investor
• Joe Kinsella, founder of CloudHealth Technologies
• Erik Peterson, co-founder and CTO of CloudZero, Inc.