50 Fun Facts About Cloud Computing

Where did Microsoft's Project Natick keep a sealed capsule of 864 servers running for two years?

On the seafloor off Orkney, Scotland, the shipping-container-sized vessel ran from 2018 until it was lifted out in July 2020. Seawater at its natural temperature did all the cooling.

Which retro ornaments does Cloudflare film in its San Francisco lobby as a source of random numbers?

Lava lamps, about 100 of them, fill a wall that a camera watches around the clock. The drifting wax gives Cloudflare's servers a backup supply of randomness, an idea first tried at Silicon Graphics in the 1990s.

What caused the February 2017 failure that left Amazon's S3 storage service down for hours?

A mistyped command did it: an engineer debugging the billing system meant to remove a few servers and took out far more. The crippled subsystems then needed a full restart.

Which streaming company built Chaos Monkey, a tool that randomly disables its own live servers?

Netflix built it while moving onto Amazon's cloud, then released the code in 2012. It grew into a whole Simian Army of tools that break things on purpose.

Which file-syncing service did Drew Houston conceive after he kept forgetting his USB drive at MIT?

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Houston and fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, with early money from the startup accelerator Y Combinator.

Which webmail service was mistaken for an April Fools' prank when it launched with 1 GB of storage?

Gmail arrived on 1 April 2004 with a gigabyte per user when 2 to 4 megabytes was the norm. Google's record of April pranks made the press release look like one more.

Which vehicle was AWS Snowmobile, unveiled in 2016 to carry up to 100 petabytes of customer data?

A truck, despite the wintry name: it followed Snowball, a 50-pound device that held 50 terabytes. Carrying data physically instead of sending it over a network is nicknamed sneakernet.

Which Microsoft cloud service, unveiled in 2008 as Project Red Dog, is named after a shade of blue?

Azure went on sale in February 2010 as Windows Azure and was renamed Microsoft Azure in 2014.

Which 2016 mobile game drew 50 times its planned player traffic on Google Cloud soon after launch?

Pokémon Go passed its expected server use within a quarter of an hour of release in Australia and New Zealand. The peak was ten times the engineers' worst-case estimate.

Which animal is the mascot of Docker, software that delivers apps in packages called containers?

The whale is called Moby Dock, a name Docker's community picked in a 2013 poll that drew 411 votes.

Which kind of industrial building in Hamina, Finland, did Google buy in 2009 to house a data centre?

A paper mill called Summa was sold to Google by Stora Enso for 40 million euros. The servers inside are cooled with seawater drawn from the Gulf of Finland.

Which container system, announced by Google in 2014, is named after the Greek word for helmsman?

Kubernetes carries the nautical theme into its logo, a ship's wheel with seven spokes. The seven nods to its code name, Project 7, after the Star Trek character Seven of Nine.

Which big-data framework did Doug Cutting name after a toy elephant that belonged to his son?

Hadoop got the name while Cutting was working at Yahoo. It was designed to spread huge jobs across clusters of cheap commodity hardware rather than one giant machine.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is named after a fake 18th-century automaton that played which game?

Chess was the Turk's game, though a human master hidden in the cabinet made every move. Amazon launched its namesake site in 2005 to farm small tasks out to human workers.

Zoom and Spotify are examples of which cloud service model, where the provider runs the whole app?

SaaS stands for software as a service, usually paid for by subscription instead of bought outright. Customer relationship management tools were one of its earliest successful markets.

In the cloud term IaaS, covering rented servers, storage and networks, what does the I stand for?

Infrastructure as a service leaves customers to deploy and run their own operating systems and applications on the rented hardware.

Which cloud deployment model binds a firm's private systems to rented public capacity?

Hybrid setups allow cloud bursting, where an application runs in-house and spills over to public capacity only when demand jumps. The firm pays for the extra power just when it is needed.

Which misleading term covers services like AWS Lambda, which run code with no machines to manage?

Serverless is a misnomer, because the provider's servers still execute the code. Billing is typically pay-per-use, so idle time costs the customer nothing.

Which software maker ended new Creative Suite releases in 2013, moving its design tools to subscription only?

Adobe moved Photoshop and its other design tools to Creative Cloud, ending one-off perpetual licences for new versions.

Which line of laptops, first sold in June 2011 with models from Acer and Samsung, was built around web access?

Chromebook laptops run ChromeOS, an operating system developed by Google, and were announced at the company's I/O conference a month before they shipped.

Which software, also called a virtual machine monitor, lets one computer run several guest systems?

A hypervisor differs from an emulator because its guests run most instructions directly on the real hardware. The computer underneath is known as the host machine.

Which software design has one running instance serve many customers, each with their own data?

Multitenancy calls each customer group a tenant, and every tenant gets a dedicated slice of the instance, including its own configuration and user management.

Which kind of scaling, also called scaling out, adds more machines instead of upgrading one?

Horizontal scaling lets groups of ordinary computers handle work that once needed expensive supercomputers. Its opposite, vertical scaling, adds processors, memory or storage to a single machine.

Which device spreads incoming requests across a pool of servers so that none is overwhelmed?

A load balancer aims to make processing more efficient overall, improving response times and keeping some machines from being overloaded while others sit unused.

Roughly how much downtime a year does a five nines target, meaning 99.999 percent uptime, allow?

About 5 minutes a year is all it allows, a handy match between the count of nines and the minutes. Each nine dropped multiplies the allowance by ten, so four nines permits roughly 50 minutes.

In EC2, Amazon's service for renting virtual computers by the second, what does the E stand for?

Elastic reflects how customers can create and shut down servers as needed and pay only while they run. The full name, Elastic Compute Cloud, has two Cs, hence the 2.

Amazon's S3 service, launched in March 2006, groups stored objects into containers called what?

Buckets group the objects, which are the basic storage units of S3. The service reached Europe in November 2007, twenty months after its American debut.

What name does AWS give to groups of data centres set far enough apart to avoid failing together?

Availability zones sit far enough apart to dodge a shared disaster yet close enough for low-latency links. Several of them together make up a region.

Which US state contains Ashburn, a community nicknamed Data Center Alley for its many server farms?

Virginia hosts the cluster in Ashburn, a major hub for internet traffic. The Wikimedia Foundation, parent of Wikipedia, keeps data centres there alongside Amazon Web Services.

Which icy name did Amazon give its low-cost archive storage, built for rarely accessed data?

Glacier trades speed for price, and the slow job of fetching an archive back out is nicknamed thawing.

Which 1960s practice gave many users at once a small slice each of one mainframe's processor?

Time-sharing became a business for IBM and other mainframe makers, who rented computing power to banks and large organisations for two decades. Cloud computing revived the idea on a far bigger scale.

Which AI pioneer predicted in 1961 that computing might one day be organised as a public utility?

John McCarthy made the forecast at MIT's centennial, comparing a future computer utility to the telephone system. He also led the development of the Lisp programming language.

Which PC maker's executives used the phrase cloud computing in a 1996 business plan?

Compaq marketing executive George Favaloro kept a copy of the plan. For his company it marked the start of a business selling servers to internet providers that grew to $2 billion a year.

Which Google boss introduced the term cloud computing to an industry conference in August 2006?

Eric Schmidt used it on 9 August 2006, which many regard as the first use of the phrase in its modern sense. Amazon began renting out virtual computers later that same month.

Which company did ex-Oracle executive Marc Benioff found in 1999 to sell business software online?

Salesforce went public in 2004, five years after it was founded, and helped prove that renting business software over the web could pay.

Which Google service, previewed in April 2008, let outside developers run their own code on Google's systems?

App Engine spent more than three years in preview before its official launch in September 2011. It runs applications written in languages such as Python, Java, Go and PHP.

Which firm, co-founded by Diane Greene in 1998, was first to succeed at selling x86 virtualisation?

VMware grew out of a Stanford University research project led by Greene's husband, Mendel Rosenblum, at a time when virtualising x86 was widely considered impractical.

Which US agency joined hosting firm Rackspace in 2010 to launch the open-source project OpenStack?

NASA supplied early code from its Nebula platform, while Rackspace contributed code from its Cloud Files storage service.

Which US agency's 2011 definition of cloud computing names five essential characteristics?

NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, put on-demand self-service, resource pooling and measured service on the list.

In which African city was Amazon's EC2 service mostly developed, by a team led by Chris Pinkham?

Cape Town was home to the team, with Pinkham setting the initial architecture and leading development alongside Willem van Biljon. A limited public beta opened in August 2006.

Who led Amazon Web Services from its inception before succeeding Jeff Bezos as Amazon's boss?

Andy Jassy and Bezos came up with the idea for the cloud business in 2003, three years before it launched. He ran it until taking the top job in July 2021.

Who ran Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group before succeeding Steve Ballmer as chief executive?

Satya Nadella had been in charge of building and running the company's computing platforms, and as chief executive he led its wider move into cloud services.

Which Apple service did Steve Jobs announce in June 2011 to replace the much-criticised MobileMe?

iCloud went live that October, and MobileMe was switched off the following June. Jobs acknowledged on stage that the older service had been seen as a failure.

Which Google game-streaming service launched in November 2019 and shut down in January 2023?

Stadia was known during development as Project Stream. When it closed, Google refunded customers for the hardware and games they had bought through its stores.

Which Chinese internet giant, based in Hangzhou, set up a cloud computing arm in 2009?

Alibaba Cloud, known in China as Aliyun, opened research and operations centres in Hangzhou, Beijing and Silicon Valley.

Which cybersecurity firm's faulty update crashed roughly 8.5 million Windows computers in July 2024?

CrowdStrike sent the bad update to its Falcon security software, hitting airlines, banks, hospitals and broadcasters in what has been called the largest outage in the history of information technology.

Which social network launched the Open Compute Project in 2011 to share its data centre designs?

Facebook began the work in 2009 as an internal effort called Project Freedom, and used some of the ideas to save energy at its data centre in Prineville.

Which content delivery company, founded in 1998, takes its name from a Hawaiian word meaning clever?

Akamai co-founder Daniel Lewin found the word in a Hawaiian-English dictionary after a colleague's suggestion. Colloquially it can also mean cool.

Which open-source virtualisation software from Cambridge University did Amazon's EC2 first rely on?

Xen began as a research project led by Cambridge lecturer Ian Pratt. Amazon started moving away from it in 2017, when it announced servers built on a custom design called Nitro.

Under which name does AWS sell spare EC2 capacity cheaply, on condition it can be taken back?

Spot Instances can be interrupted at just 120 seconds' notice when Amazon needs the capacity back, and they come with no uptime guarantee.