Tech and AI: 2. The Cloud

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BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Welcome to Understand Tech and AI, the podcast that takes you back to basics to explain, explore, unpick, and demystify the technology that's becoming part of our everyday lives.

I'm Spencer Kelly from BBC Click and you will find all of these episodes on BBC Sounds.

Now, you know how it is.

You're out and about with your phone and you say, hey Siri, how do I get to the train station?

And it gives you directions.

You film a video of a busker along the way and you upload it to your millions of followers on your social network.

But have you ever stopped to wonder, hang on, is my phone doing all of that on its own?

Is it recognising what I say?

Is it playing that video of the busker to anyone that wants to watch it?

What, even when I switch it off later?

Well, no, it's not.

Impressive though your phone is, some things need more computing power than that little thing in your pocket.

Here, it is just the front man for something mysterious, something ethereal.

something

called the cloud.

You can think of it as a massive brain sat somewhere out there, which you can borrow if you need it.

I do think we need to get a bit more technical than that, though, so I am joined by Carlene Jackson, founder of Cloud9 Insight, which helps companies to get to grips with the cloud.

Carlene, hi.

Good morning.

All right.

Big question first.

What is the cloud and where is it?

I often used to imagine the cloud somewhere up in the sky, but in reality, it's a place of data centers and there are many around the world.

And that's where our data and our applications are often stored these days.

It's a place of immense data storage.

Our photos can get backed up there.

Our voice notes can get backed up there.

We play music and videos from the cloud.

Can you explain how all that information gets?

from one to the other, from the cloud to me and my photos get from me back to the cloud.

Typically in this country, what we're doing is connecting with our Wi-Fi in our home or our office and then that's connecting via fiber optics to your local exchange.

It might be on your street corner and from there it connects with the local network infrastructure and up to a data center.

I've been to some of these data centers over the years and I know that you have as well.

They are They're pretty amazing places to stand inside, aren't they?

Oh my goodness.

If anyone ever gets a chance to visit a data center, you should definitely say yes because it's not something you get to do every day.

It's like visiting a cross between a really futuristic building and a prison.

And on the outside, you have no idea what is there, the facility, and you just come in and the security is incredible.

There's a lot of biometrics.

It's full of corridors that you'd go down with all these incredible lights and all these locked rooms that you could see into and all these floor-to-ceiling computers.

And every room that you went into had to be cleared in advance.

And it feels like a real privilege to be in that sort of place.

You feel very safe there as well.

They are real assaults on the senses, aren't they?

Because Because the first thing I always notice is the noise when you walk into these rooms full of computers.

It's quite incredible.

It's the only thing you can hear really, just this whirling.

What is equally amazing is it's not the computers making most of the noise, it's the cooling fans.

That's right.

These data centers are running hundreds or thousands of computers and it's really important to keep them cool or they just don't function.

And what we're seeing is that data centers are innovating with how can they do that more cost effectively because that's that's very high demand on energy to keep them at that cool temperature.

And so that means a lot of them are being built further north in the cooler climate so they can just suck in cold air from outside without having to artificially cool it.

That's right.

So I know that Microsoft did an experiment with putting 850 servers underwater near Orkney, a place in Scotland that's very forward-thinking around energy consumption and how they can try and use renewables as much as possible.

And so Microsoft, for example, and I'm sure other data centers are looking at how can they put these data centers in places that are going to consume less energy because the ambient temperature outside is lower most of the time anyway.

I've been to Iceland and you get a double whammy in Iceland because you get the cool air coming in, but also the electricity is really cheap and sustainable because it's geothermal.

That's fantastic.

I know that there's definitely a lot more of a trend where cities are working together with data center builders to try and tap into that heat source that's coming out so that it can be used in the local grid.

Really though, how sustainable is it for us to use these computers?

Would it be better to either store things locally on a computer we can switch off or even print out our photos rather than have them stored on computers that are always on?

If you just print the photos that you want, that's potentially a more sustainable situation than if you just upload your photos.

I think most people take a lot more pictures than they actually need.

You might take four photos and choose one of them, but don't take the time to delete that photo.

That's actually creating a need for storage on a data center.

So that's needing energy that potentially wouldn't have been required.

Okay, we've got these huge data centers.

They cost millions and millions of pounds.

And often we are given access to them for free, at least initially.

So who owns the cloud and what's in it for them?

So there are probably three major vendors of data centers.

And of course, there are other owners of data centers across the world, but three major names that you typically think of.

It'd be Microsoft, they have Microsoft Azure that's their platform for the cloud, and that's for storing data and applications.

And then you've got AWS owned by Amazon, and then you have Google as well.

So they're the sort of three major vendors, and you typically find that in the UK, most businesses tend to be working with one of those three.

Okay, Carlene, I would like like to pause there for a minute or two, if I may, because our resident technology historian has a few things that he wants to share.

He is Dr.

James Sumner from the University of Manchester, and here he is with the story of cloud formation.

The origins of the cloud are appropriately cloud-shaped.

If you look across the history of personal computing, two very different visions stand out, and the cloud is the outcome of both of them.

The first approach, which started around 1960, was sometimes called utility computing, because it treated number crunching as a utility, like mains electricity.

The equivalent of a power station was a big central computer, with perhaps thousands of users connecting up to use it at once.

The computer could only deal with one user's problems at a time, but being also a very fast computer, it would hop between them so quickly that everyone felt like they had constant access.

The beauty of these time-sharing systems was that the users didn't need much more than a screen and a keyboard.

The opposite approach was to find a way to really give each user a self-contained computer of their very own.

This started to become practical in the 1970s, as the famous silicon chips got powerful enough to serve as a small computer in their own right.

Utility computing went into sharp decline in the 1980s as companies installed a personal computer on every desk.

Speaking in 1991, Ted Hoff of Intel, who came up with the first design for a computer on a chip, pointed out that they were also cheaper.

It's like a light bulb.

When it burns out, you unplug it and you throw it in the garbage.

And they were just dumbfounded at the idea that a computer could be so inexpensive you'd think about throwing it away.

With modern internet connections, you get a world where everyone's basic computer or phone can connect up to use software that's actually running on another computer system somewhere else.

And that system's not a big central computer, it's a huge network of small computers.

And the somewhere else can be anywhere, or indeed everywhere at once.

That was Dr.

James Sumner.

So Carlene, as James was saying, we've got all of these computers sitting in all of these buildings in all of these countries around the the world, and some of the cloud then stores our data, and some does really powerful computing.

So, yes, it started off that the cloud was used mainly as a place to store data, but more recently it's a place that you can put your business applications, and even more and more organizations are tapping into supercomputers in the cloud.

And that's given organizations like Moderna, which was developing the vaccine, only took 42 days for them to get using these supercomputers.

And they're quite a small company to be able to get to the position of where they could provide trials for their vaccines for COVID.

So this is brilliant.

So instead of just using the desktop computers in their office, which aren't that powerful, they are able to just remotely use these massive supercomputers to do things that they would never be able to do in their own office.

I think this simulation is really advancing scientists' progress in whether it's coming up with new vaccines or simulating new innovations that historically might have taken months or years to do.

They can do it in a much more condensed period of time.

One really interesting use of the cloud is that we don't have to buy bits of software anymore on DVDs and install them on our computer.

We just go to a web browser and we can run something like Microsoft Office through a web browser.

And that's the web processor and the spreadsheet and everything.

They're all running in the cloud, aren't they?

And we just see the end results in our browser.

The amazing thing about Office 365, it is in the cloud, but the software, the Office 365 software package that say a startup would buy is identical to say what British Airways would use.

The same security, the same data centers, the way it's installed, everything's the same.

So you're giving a small business access to the same incredible technology.

Now I know plenty of people who would say, I'm not trusting anyone else with my data, my personal information, my family photos.

I'd rather keep them on my computer at home where I can see them.

Now I think that is an understandable point of view, but counterintuitively, the cloud is a safer place to store stuff than your home computer, isn't it?

Absolutely.

I think it used to be in the days that people would put their files or photos or precious things onto a USB.

And what happens if you lose that?

God forbid, leave it on a train for somebody else to pick up and access.

Or what if you have a fire in your house?

I have a close friend who runs a business and their office actually burnt down.

And if it wasn't for the fact that they had all of their data, including their emails on the cloud, it wouldn't have been as easy for them to simply on the same day go and buy some new computers and literally keep running their business.

So it's important that you think about security of your data in many ways.

Is it backed up?

So often people say, when was the last backup?

And everyone just looks at each other, where's the backup file?

They were the olden days, but of course.

Yeah, the data centers now look after all of that for you and make sure everything's encrypted and secure and there's a lot of resilience that they build in because certainly from a business perspective, the ability to sort of protect your data is likely to be very front of mind these days.

How safe is my personal data in the cloud from hacking?

Because I remember at least one story a few years ago where some celebrities had some rather private photos stolen that were stored in the cloud.

Aaron Ross Powell, so trust and security of your data is really one of the top priorities of any of these vendors, such as Microsoft or AWS, because without their reputation intact of how they're looking after your data, they have no business.

So I would feel very confident in using the data centers, and that's beside the fact that your server physically is backed up potentially locally to another one in that region.

I think, for example, Microsoft have about 60 different regions across the world.

And so typically they would have another secondary data center that your data is backed up to.

So it's going to be pretty safe.

It seems incredibly unlikely, possibly even impossible for the entire cloud to fail or blow away or something.

But if it did, what services would collapse?

My goodness, that would be a really incredibly mind-blowing experience.

I think everything would come to a standstill.

Well, listen, Carlene, thank you so much.

And here's to many cloudy days ahead.

It's a pleasure.

Thank you.

So there you are.

The cloud demystified.

Mist.

Do you see?

Hmm.

And if there's one thing that you can take away from this episode, it's this.

The cloud has a real physical form.

It's a huge number of computers in many places across the world, providing storage and vast processing power that makes your phone or your laptop look amazing.

Now, the cloud may sound ethereal, but where we're going next time really is imaginary.

I'm going to get you to put on some magic glasses and step into a different world.

We're going to talk virtual reality, augmented reality, and the metaverse.

See you on the other side.

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