More and more of our daily lives takes place online, from banking and schooling to working and family gatherings, even more so amid the coronavirus pandemic. The cloud is the invisible computing architecture that keeps many of these digital platforms and tools running smoothly. Really, being in the cloud just means storing data on “someone else’s computer.” A few major tech companies run massive global networks of data centers, linked with ocean-spanning fiber-optic cables and complex systems of integrated hardware and software. So there is no single cloud per se. Rather, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google each run their own systems, almost like parallel internets. The risks of a company’s whole cloud system going down at once are computer science engineering, though isolated outages of particular cloud services do happen.
Many internet users are seeing firsthand how disruptive it can be when the online tools they are relying on unexpectedly go offline or experience other bugs. For instance, when the videoconferencing software Zoom went offline for several hours one day in late August 2020, virtual classes around the United States were disrupted.
No comments:
Post a Comment