In the last few years, I’ve seen the one come up over and over and over again in the news and among the blogs I read: that the cloud is much more material than tech companies would have you believe.
I think people are beginning to understand that all the “stuff” we do on the internet has a material impact: data centers are built; they take up land; the use a lot of water in often arid areas; they get tax breaks; and so on.
But I also suspect that despite the cloud’s ubiquity, most people don’t fully understand how the apps/websites/software they use on a daily basis actually uses resources on the cloud.
This is where my digital garden project comes in: I want to start (slowly) building a map of the key entities in our daily cloud lives. It’s a nice opportunity to share what I learn and maybe do it in an accessible way too.
Here are some places I could start:
- The internet request: What happens when you load a website, in theory (make an HTTP GET request, and you get a document back)
- The internet request, unpacked: What happens when you load a website, in practice (DNS resolution, get document, run scripts, get assets from CDN, hydrate data from APIs, get server-side rendered components)
There are other places that would be interesting but I need to learn more about before I can write something meaningful:
- How DNS works
- How CDNs work
- How EC2 and cloud compute works
- How cloud storage works
- Which of these systems are distributed and how
- Where these systems are hosted (which data centers? why?)
- What kind of hardware runs in these datacenters?
- How does virtualization actually run in a datacenter?
- How many computers can one pageload actually touch?
Onward!