What is the Cloud? Soft and Fluffy Edition - Computer Stuff They Didn't Teach You #10

Hello friends, it's me again, Scott Hanselman. I'm going to talk to you today about some things that I don't think

they

taught you in school, but I thought you would love it and I think this is a very special episode of things that

they

didn

't

teach

you in school. I always liked it when Mr. Rogers said things. so there was always an after school special and there was always a very special episode so why would this be very special? special because I have some devices that I don't normally have, one or two

computer

s here are mine, but most of the things that I'm going to show you or not, that's very special,

what

is the

cloud

,

what

does that really mean?

Lots of marketing, lots of buzzwords. I was talking to a friend of mine who is at the beginning of his career, let's say he was under 25 years old. It's not a question of age, it's more a question of familiarity when I started with the

cloud

.

didn

't exist, there was your

computer

and then there was someone else's computer, so one could argue when you ask what the cloud is, it means it's someone else's computer, just like when you rent a car, it's someone else's car. person, I treat my cars with a lot of respect, I want to hurt you, but I tend to be very bad with rental cars.

People tend to be really mean to other people's computers too and that's maybe okay because it's their problem. So what is a cloud? What is the cloud? Good that? I'm going to keep trying to do this with all of our videos in one take. I'm going to use my phone, which is a computer by the way, and I'm going to do a little handheld shot here, so let's press record. with our phone here and we'll have a conversation, okay, let's talk about computers and we're going to go up to the cloud, so this is a computer, this is a surface duo, it's a flip phone, look at those nasty ones. those nasty fingerprints, it's a little computer, it's a lot more powerful than the computers that sent us to the moon, but that's a computer, it's got those nice windows, nice Windows logo, here's a computer, surface book, three beautiful, powerful, it's my personal computer, it has a screen. it has storage it has memory it's okay very powerful it's not the most powerful computer here's a surface pro x this is a computer but it doesn't use an intel chip it uses an arm chip so some people might say it's Like a telephone, it is designed for low levels.

The power arm

stuff

was intended for low-power intelligence. Things were originally intended for a lot of power and now there is competition that you could see like honda versus toyota or mercedes versus bmw. Many people firmly believe that arm chips are the way to go. either Intel chips are the way to go or AMD or something else, but these are all computers, they have storage, they have screens, okay these are personal computers, they're not really servers. Now I could take my laptop, I could put it in the other room. and I could say this is a server, how would you know that you wouldn't know that you would just go to http, whatever and you would have a website or something that was happening and that would be cool and you would be fine with that.

I guess if this did something useful I could go and do it, maybe I could take a really small computer like a Raspberry Pi. We have already talked about Raspberry Pi before. Let's see if we have a Raspberry Pi. I could go here and find her. a computer that I actually have, I think the small parts look at that made a label and I called it small parts and cakes, notice how I didn't really make a differentiation between what was a small computer in a cake, I looked in here and we found, oh, look On this, this is Intel, it's called the Compute Stick, it's got HDMI, it's got USB, so you could take it and plug it into a monitor and plug in the keyboard, and that's a computer.

I don't know if I would call it a cloud. Do I have a Raspberry Pi? Here we go, there is a Raspberry Pi Zero which is a small computer. What would happen if you took a bunch of any of these computers and stacked them on top of each other? Maybe I could put them on a shelf, organize them. they could all work together, that could be a strange computer, you could take this surface and this surface and this surface and they could all sit on top of each other, you could call this number one, number two and number three, maybe it could be hanselman. com my last name and I would say go to hanselman.com and this has my website and this has my website and this has my website and we would pick one and we would say uh let that one take care of everything oh and then she would handle it and then he will handle it and they would take turns maybe this is www.1 and ww2 on www 3 they would take turns like in a round robin it would be strange to have three different ones I guess I could get maybe three of all the same type maybe I could take a bunch of raspberry cakes and I could stack them on top of each other here's a bunch of raspberry cakes I've got six of them six raspberry cakes all sitting on top of each other and this is now kind of a rack of raspberry cakes and now they're all They could do the work of one, two, three, four, five, six computers.

Now what would happen if you treated them as a single computer? I'm going to think of this rack as a computing unit, a computing u, we'll call it, I can set it up like this, I could stack them all up, I could do it pretty well, look how I actually made a nice power supply here and connected them all to the same agreement to be able to In fact, plug in all these computers, all these processors, all this storage and it could go like this and you could plug it in. I could stack them. Each of these is a quad processor.

These four processors in each Raspberry Pi multiplied by six, that is, 24. Where are the hard drives, where are the disks? Well, a disk and a Raspberry Pi is an SD card, so look, they take out the hard drive. What that means is let's say this was working for me and Raspberry Pi number three got sick. Maybe I could exchange. that or fix it or I could wait until six, you know three of them are sick and then maybe I would change everything, but the others would still work and I could think of that unit, that compute unit as one thing and I just plug it in one place , so I have what's called redundancy, which means that well, these two could be dead and these four will take over the job until I can fix them and that's interesting, but I would only have one. power supply, so if this dies, all these guys go away, so it's a pain, so we'll talk about redundancy, but that's a computer you could call a server, it doesn't have a screen, it's a headless server, it doesn't have head, it has no screen, I haven't connected any of them, I'll just go and connect them to my network and let them talk and I'll talk to them with a terminal, maybe I'll do ssh or I'll shut up on those I'd like to say shut up with the computers here there is another computer, not the laymen, my friends, not the laymen, this is called sinology and this sinology is a small Intel computer with five hard drives like those SSD cards.

I could take out the hard drives individually and if one or two of them died, it wouldn't ruin everything and I have some redundancy because I have a battery backup, so if I were to make a cloud, if I were to make a server in someone else's room person, you'd probably want backup batteries and storage and processing and a network cable that goes outside so it starts to look like a server. It is much larger than a Raspberry Pi. I could stack them. You could have five or ten of these and maybe you could rent them. getting a shelf the size of a refrigerator would be really cool, so these computers aren't really suited for the cloud, this is starting to get where we want, but the cloud is other people's computers at scale, what does that mean at scale? scale? do something, you're going to do it big here I have six raspberry pines maybe I could have six thousand or sixty thousand or a whole costco the size of building a whole aircraft carrier or ten of them or one in each country or one in each state or several in each region and dozens of regions around the world that would be interesting.

I call this a unit. I said it's one. I just made it up, but what if someone standardized what a unit was and made them, let's say we? We're going to make ours the same way container ships decided a container should be a certain way, that way we can stack them on a ship. That's why this is a very special episode and that's why you've done it's 10 and 10 minutes look at this look at this my friends what is this is a surface it doesn't have that logo it has that logo it has that logo this is a 1u blue stack border this is a real slice of blue now blue is a cloud and the cloud is other people's computers so this is a Micro

soft

computer.

Micro

soft

doesn't always make its own computers. They have friends who make them. Now can I buy something like this? I can buy a portion. You could buy one unit or one. 2u or 4u, each unit is about this height and I can stack them. Look how big it is. It's probably much more powerful than this, but it also serves a different purpose. You could stack them and have dozens of them in a refrigerator and then dozens. of refrigerators, an entire warehouse and then dozens of warehouses and then it would have great power. This doesn't look like any computer I've ever seen, so let's open the top and see what's going on, so check this out. very special I'm going to take my light I'm going to show us a piece of blue in my house I didn't buy this why I didn't buy this couple of reasons first I don't have this amount of money but second I didn't buy this because it's something that is rented, it's a car rent, it's a lease, you just pay it per month and you get a piece of blue.

Now you wouldn't put this in your house unless you had an amazing one at home and you had a shelf, you could totally do that. This is what you would put on premises or on premises. People like to argue whether it's on-premises or on-premise. I'll let you argue about that in the comments. these 10 of these 32 of these stack thousands of them next to each other or I take one of them 10 of them I bring them to my building I do my work locally and then I have a portion of blue here and then the rest of the blue outside in the world so let's look at this let's compare this with that little Raspberry Pi stack here there are six of these there is one of those are both computers are a processor and a heat sink a processor and a heat sink and then memory this is interesting what is happening Here, how much memory is there?

I'm going to go ahead and remove this plastic that can't be important, right? Alright. These are great because they are meant to be taken apart because if something breaks you need to fix it. How much memory is this, it's 16 gigs of ram, 16 gigs is a lot, I have 16 gigs on my surface, that device has 16 gigs of ram, that's a lot of ram, it's 16 gigs, I have 16 gigs of ram in just one of these computers that's just one, let's see here what this is, it's a ram drive, no, it's a slot that we could put RAM in in the future, so it's expandable, much like your desktop PC, these drives RAM are really simpler, very similar, they are what is called ecc or error correction ram, but if we go down here and compare them to my computer, which also has ram, you will see my colorful rainbow ram, it is the same concept one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight times 16.

That's a lot. ram but look one two three four five six seven six 384 gigabytes of potential ram two large processors what are these what are these look they are fans you think you have fans in your computer look how I took them out so easily why would they let it do that because everything is interchangeable, look at that little one over there, a little connector, everyone has a friend and if I wanted to I could change it and fix it, so imagine all these cloud servers stacked up and I can pull them out like the drawers pull it out and someone could say : Hi, Scott's number five belt needs to be replaced and I'm going to put in a new fan and arrange for all these things to be interchangeable, identifiable by a name, video cards, why would they?

You need a video card if you're not going to connect it to anything. This video card here is special because it's from nvidia and it allows me to do what's called gpu or graphics processing unit specific work which is often used for machine learning which we could talk about that in another video as well. that I have GPU and CPU not only to play but also to work hard. I talked a little about power supplies. What's going on here? Let's see here. I can put in my plugs. Can I take one of these out with one? hand while I'm filming with an ah, look at that, look at that, my friends, it's a let's see if I can't break it, there you go, it's a redundant power supply.

You could have multiple power supplies if that went wrong. I could change it. It's the same thing as this, except I bought it on Amazon for twenty bucks and it was designed by some smart people and put together as Azure Stack Edge, so this isn't a part of the cloud, it's a part of my personal cloud, right? TRUE? I can have this in my house, run a portion of blue. I can have a local cloud and then I can have it connect to onebig cloud This one is limited only by what I choose to put in it.

How many do I buy, except the cloud? itself is unlimited because you can go and add them now when I have it locally I can only run my applications but when I put something in the cloud I usually share things so let's say this was in the cloud and you were running your website and you wanted to visit your website you would have to go and find out where you were you wouldn't be alone on one computer you would be on at least three in the old days you could visit a website you could visit yourself on this in the server room and you could say that that it's thecomputer where my

stuff

is I can do that at home I can come here and I can tell where your files are my spouse says where the file is they are this they are here they are on these drives that's where your pictures are they are when I put them in the cloud I can say well, they are in a thing that looks like this in a building that looks like Costco, it has a lot of things inside, where are the records?

Look at this, press this button, remove the front put this here what is this one two three four nine what happens if I press the button? oh look, we just came out with a two terabyte Intel 1.6 drive, so let's say it's 1.5 3 6 9 12 and some changes, oh, that's smaller. one 240 gig, so it could be maybe a zero disk, maybe it's a smaller one, maybe it has an operating system and the others have data, regardless of how often they come out they can be replaced, so when I put my program in here, when I put my file here, it will exist in at least three places, but not across three places here, different parts of the building, what if I said you would save this for me? can you put this in the cloud for me? i make as many copies as i can but not on the same machine maybe i will put it on this shelf and the shelf next to it but that shelf is too close i will put it on this shelf a couple of times on a shelf that is far away a shelf that is on the other side and you know we're in portland maybe we'll put some in seattle and some in japan and some in south africa that way we have copies everywhere I don't like to think about copies so I'll let the cloud take care of that and there is when the cloud starts to be different from other people's computers because with other people's computers you can call yourself and say I broke it well, I lost it, I stepped on it, I dropped it but cloud, the software automatically treats these machines as a unit transparently, so the cloud is a combination of hardware that is elastic and redundant.

Notice that everything here is redundant, there are two out of three of everything, but the software is also redundant. I pull one of these out forcefully. hard drives if I'm a bad person and I get into the cloud and I take out a hard drive I start taking out hard drives the cloud should heal the cloud should heal and then someone can go and say hello fan number five and disk number seven and I need more memory here and can you fix this CD-ROM and is there some power? All of that can live in something like this thousands of times thousands of times in many countries and that is a blue stack edge which is a part of the cloud that you can rent yourself and then connect to the actual cloud, so it's like a local giant cloud.

I'm not sure what I would call it but that's why they call it the edge because it's on the edge of the cloud which is where I live in my house they're going to make me give that back to them but I thought it was very interesting to think about the difference between these lightweight arm devices, these phone devices, think about these larger laptops, desktop computers, other arm devices, the arm is a type of processor that has low power, you could imagine an arm like this, no there is nothing in the cloud that requires a certain type of processor and then we think about other clouds, my little mini cloud in my house, here that is my advantage, my little sinology, it does not run in blue but it runs Linux, the cloud can run Linux or Windows or whatever.

This weighs a lot, it's very heavy. I'm going to have to bring it back, so it's a friendly 20 minute introduction for anyone who's working in the cloud and thinking about the cloud. Maybe all you've ever seen about the cloud is a movie where they walk into a server room and someone grabs a USB key and they have to copy it in just a few minutes before the bad guys find them and say: trying to steal our data, the cloud is full of it, it's huge and it's amazing, it's a combination of redundant hardware and smart software and you can have a part of the cloud in your house, you can build a part of the cloud with something like this or It's You might never ever see or touch one of these and then you'll just work in the cloud and that's cool too, so I think this has been a very special episode of what they didn't

teach

you in school, things about computing that they didn't teach you. they taught. teach you at school if you like this tell people I'm doing this for dozens and dozens of dollars that I use to buy tacos and toys um, this is not my computer, this is not my phone, I'm going to give it back to the very nice people who lent it to me, but these are my raspberry pies, so if you subscribe and tell people about this show that I do in my free time when my kids are asleep, then maybe I can buy another raspberry pie for my little one. cloud can I put it on top thank you very much I'm scott hanselman smash that bell