I was reading this report on a flight. The flight attendant was highly amused by the title: A cloud for doing good. What a weird title she said. Well, here is an answer from David Pogue to the question of what is the cloud?
You may have encountered the Cloud as a synchronizing service. If you edit a photo on your Apple laptop, you see it a couple of seconds later the same way on your iPhone. There’s no direct connection between the two devices. Instead, the data makes an intermediate hop.
In a fraction of a second, it comes to a massive data center in Loudoun County, Virginia, and then goes to your phone.
Most of the time, though, you use the Cloud without knowing it, because most of those Cloud data centers exist to serve companies.
“It could be retail, it could be real estate, healthcare, life sciences, oil and gas — everything from small initial startups right through to the very, very largest enterprises,” said Matt Wood, a general manager at Amazon Web Services, or AWS. It’s by far the biggest Cloud service company in the world — bigger than its next 14 competitors combined.
Not a bad story, but I do not believe that 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic runs through Loudon County VA. More and more, Asia’s traffic stays in Asia.
1 Comment
Alison gillwald
More than 70 %African Internet traffic still peering in Europe mostly London (with resultant high latency even though prices dropped significantly).