Cool Technology and the Intelligent Enterprise
No Wormholes, Guaranteed
I got your attention with the title, didn’t I? Look, I know I said yesterday that we shouldn’t talk to strangers and this guy is probably the reason our moms and dads felt that way. But it takes all kinds to make this crazy world go ‘round. I promised from the beginning that I would share everything I learned about technology, so this is me keeping my promise. (In case you missed one of my blogs in this series, here is a link to catch up.) And now …
So, a few days back I’m in Millennium Park waiting for my friend Kay. I’m sitting on the wall in front of the “the bean.” You know, that sculpture that either looks like a massive chrome soybean or a gargantuan bumper guard from a ’57 Chevy? Anyway, I’m just sitting on the wall in front of it, looking at the the reflection of the sky, and this rather unusual character sits next to me.
“Don’t get too close,” he says.
“How’s that?”
“Don’t get too close; it’s dangerous.”
“How do you mean?”
“Watch that girl in the red dress.”
“Why? What are you talking about?”
“Just watch. You know what they call that thing?”
“The bean.”
“That’s what they want you to call it, but the real name is ‘Cloud Gate.’ It’s a portal to another dimension.”
“It is?”
“That’s why they call it ‘Cloud Gate’, Dummy. It’s a gateway into the clouds. Do you know what’s in the clouds?”
“I’m thinking water vapor.”
“Everything is in the clouds these days. They run entire businesses in the clouds. You ever see airplanes up there crossing the sky, making clouds?”
“You mean contrails?”
“That’s what they want you to call it. So much has been moved up there that natural clouds can’t support it all. The government has to create an entire neural network of artificial clouds to compensate, and that, my friend, is why we have climate change! Now, let me ask you something; where’s the girl in the red dress?
“Um, I don’t know. I wasn’t watching.”
“I was! She slipped through a time/space wormhole in the bottom of that thing and is traveling through the clouds.”
“I think she just walked away.”
“Well, that’s one possibility — the one they want you to believe. But it just might be that she’s time-traveling through a wormhole.”
“You sound like this guy I know, Jack Finney.”
“Oh, I know Jack. He’s the only one who believes. Jack understands the link between technology and time — a link that can only be found in the clouds. Everything is linked — linked in one giant block chain.”
“Blockchain?”
“It’s all done in a secret binary code. Everything is binary you know — ones and zeroes. That’s what makes business in the clouds possible my friend, and that’s what makes time-travel possible. It’s binary. Either you’re here — or you’re not.”
“How come you’re here and not sucked into the cloud?”
“I wear duct tape underwear. It confounds the anodic wave forms. Duct tape underwear is my own invention, but before long everyone will be wearing it. It’s not perfected yet, and it kind of hurts when you take it off, but it works.”
“How do you know?”
“I haven’t gone through a wormhole yet.”
“Yeah but . . .”
“Jack has! Look, if you give it an honest review on my website, I’ll sell you some underwear at half-price. I can even make thongs for the missus. Guaranteed you won’t go through a wormhole or your money back.”
“Hello. Who’s your friend?” Kay asked, arriving on the scene.
“He’s not my friend; we just met. He was telling me about his underwear collection. He’ll sell you some if you’d like.”
“Well there’s a conversation starter,” Kay said, “but I don’t think I need any underwear just now.”
“It has a no-wormhole guarantee!” he exclaimed.
“It’s very tempting, but Kay and I have a dinner reservation, so we have to move along.” Then pressing a few bills into his hand, I added, “If you run into Jack, let him know we’re looking for him, okay?”
As we walked away Kay asked, “He knows Jack?”
“Yeah, they talk about time-travel. He says ‘the bean’ is a wormhole that allows companies to put their business in the clouds, but if you get too close, it’ll suck you into the time-space continuum.”
“Good to know. Have you talked to Charlotte? Was that Jack at the Air and Water Show?”
“Unknown, but whoever it was just disappeared. I talked to Charlotte on the phone yesterday. I think she realizes Jack is a con man or a performance artist or something, but she doesn’t know what his deal is. She still talks about him on her podcast.”
At last it was time to make good on that “sophisticated” dinner I owed Kate. We made our way to Michigan Avenue and grabbed an Uber to Vinci in Lincoln Park. She had the Chicken Saltimbocca, I had Rigatoni, and we both topped it off with their “famoso” cheesecake. We lingered at the table with a couple of cups of coffee, but soon decided we needed to walk off the meal.
“So, what did you think?” she said, “It’s nice to have a sophisticated meal every now and then, right?”
“Well, it’s hard to beat Portillo’s hot dogs, but an awesome Italian dinner with a woman like you is as good as it gets.”
“What do you mean, ‘a woman like me?’ I’m the only woman like me.”
“I guess that makes me a very lucky guy.”
As we walked down the street, we started laughing about the guy with the duct tape underwear again. His understanding of cloud computing seemed charmingly naïve, until we realized that we didn’t exactly know how cloud computing works either.
Then, as we passed by a start-up software company something in the window caught my eye. “Big Shoulders Blockchain. Bring your business into the blockchain era. Build, update, customize, and analyze your own private, public, or permissioned blockchain.”
“Blockchain. Underwear guy said something about that. You have any clue what blockchain is?”
“Nope.”
Then something else caught my eye. A poster of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. “Look!” I said, “I’ve been seeing this poster everywhere lately. There’s one in your library.”
“We’ve had that poster for years.”
“Yeah, okay, but the ones I’ve been seeing around town like this say, ‘Join the SAPien movement — August 18 at McCormick Place.’ What’s that about?”
“I have no idea.”
“And I thought you knew everything. At least everything about the Renaissance.”
“Well, that’s not about the Renaissance. That’s about something on August 18.”
I walked Kay home, but the next day I was still thinking about that cloud thing. I wanted to know more. The good news is that I have this friend, Lou Marino, who works the graveyard shift in a data center on the West Side and he knows about this stuff. The bad news is that it’s just his day job while he studies stand-up comedy at Second City.
So, I called him up and he goes, “Yellow! Al here.”
“Al? Who’s Al? What’s with the Al thing, Lou?”
“Tony! My man! That’s my new stage name. I’m going to be like ‘The Computer Comedian,’ so I needed a high-tech name. From now on I’m going to be Al Phanumeric. What do you think?”
“Al Phanumeric? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s the best tech name you could come up with?”
“Trust me. It’ll grow on you. What can I do you for, Tony?”
“Well, I’m writing a blog and I need some help. I’m trying to figure out why it’s called ‘Cloud Computing.’”
“Oh, that’s easy. Because ‘Swamp Computing’ didn’t go over with the focus groups.”
“Seriously, can you explain ‘the cloud’ to me?”
“Cirrus-ly? Is that a cloud reference? Cirrus-ly? I like it! I’m going to use it in the act.”
“You’re so annoying. Just explain it to me.”
“I can, but it might be over your head. Get it? Cloud? Over your head?”
“Lou . . .”
“Call me Al.”
“I’m not calling you Al unless you explain the whole cloud thing to me straight.”
“Oh wow, you’re bringing me down now. Okay, look, it’s not that hard. Businesses or people can buy Cloud service just like you buy anything else today. No one sews their own clothes any more. People don’t grow their own food, and they don’t make their own electricity. The same thing is true with the Cloud. You also don’t need to store, backup, or update your software anymore, and you don’t really need to know how the whole ‘Internet of Things’ is connected.”
“I don’t?”
“No. Just chill. You’re more annoying than me sometimes.”
“Am not.”
“Are too, you big child. Look, you go into the grocery store and buy Froot Loops — do you call up Kellogg’s and ask how they get the corn to go into those colored loopy shapes? No! You take the box home, you pour milk on the cereal, and you eat it. That’s it. You don’t need to know what goes on in the Cloud either. That’s why it’s called the Cloud. It’s not because the data is actually up in the sky some place, it’s because it’s in some vague, obscured place that you don’t need to see, and wouldn’t be allowed to see even if you wanted to.”
“Yeah, but if you don’t tell me how it works, I’ll start constructing conspiracy theories and wearing duct tape underwear.”
“Is that like some kind of weird internet meme I’m not aware of?”
“Forget it. Just tell me where the data is if it’s not in a cloud.”
“That’s kind of a nebulous subject. Get it? Cloud is a ‘nebulous’ subject? You like that one?”
“Lou . . .”
“Al.”
“. . . I thought you weren’t going to do that.”
“You started it with the duct tape underwear.”
“Just tell me where the data is.”
“Okay. It’s on the West Side, down by the river.”
“It is?”
“Yeah! There, and a whole lot of other places all over the world. It’s pretty simple; the data is in a data center. A place so secure you couldn’t get in the front door.”
“There’re a lot of places that won’t let me in the front door.”
“And beyond the front door, there are all these layers of security that I can’t tell you about. Every day they scan my eye balls to make sure I’m me. And every day I go in thinking, ‘Wow, if somebody gauges my eyes out, I could lose my job.’ But people like you, you don’t care about the risks I take to keep your data safe. Ingrate! Do you really want to know how the Cloud works?”
“I do.”
“It’s simple. One hard drive is a computer, two are a network, and three’s a cloud. You get it? Three’s a cloud!”
“Are you ever going to explain it?”
“Sure, but you’re going to be disappointed, because unless you really get into the details it’s not that complicated. Look, there are three layers in the Cloud: IAAS — Infrastructure as a service, PAAS — Platform as a service, and SAAS — Software as a service. Now, IAAS is the backbone of the whole thing. To begin with, it includes all the hardware. Which reminds me, how many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. It’s a hardware problem! That’s an old one, but it’s a real cloud pleaser. Get it? Cloud pleaser?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Really? I can explain it to you. It’s funnier when I explain it.”
“Just tell me about the hardware.”
“You got no imagination, you know that? So okay. Inside the data center are rows and rows of servers. They have hard drives just like you have in your computer, but there are thousands of them. The challenge is that they all have to be connected in a certain way, with fiber optic cables to reduce latency, and then there have to be backups, and backups of the backups, and there has to be a giant power supply, and batteries for emergency backup, and giant generators to back those up, and all of this means massive amounts of power and lots of heat, and lots of water to cool everything down. It’s just a massive number of servers all laid out in rows, and in the end, we don’t call it a Cloud, we call it a server farm. Want to hear some farm jokes?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Okay, the bottom line is that data centers are more efficient than millions of people all having their own servers, because we’re working at a much larger scale. But the Cloud is more than just the machines. The servers and networks are part of it, but IAAS also includes the operating systems, and storage, and virtualization technology that allows businesses to virtually control the operation because they can’t get into the building without getting their eyeballs scanned. IAAS also allows businesses to purchase resources on-demand and as-needed instead of having to buy more hardware outright. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then there’s PAAS. Platform as a service provides a platform for software creation. This allows developers the opportunity to concentrate on building the software while not having to worry about operating systems, software updates, storage, or infrastructure.”
“SAAS, software as a service, is what end users think of as the Cloud. It eliminates the need to download and install applications on each individual computer, and people can also store documents and access them from anywhere via the internet.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s the big picture, but the demand for data centers is growing faster than the supply, particularly with the increased demand for blockchain.”
“What’s blockchain?”
“I think it’s when you have a fetish for play money.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I know Joe.”
“Ask him; he’s into that. The point is that the massive demand for data storage, the increasing use of the Internet of Things, Cloud services, data analytics, and so much more, means the demand for secure, efficient data storage and retrieval is absolutely awe-inspiring.”
“Yeah.”
“Except when I connected my phone to the Cloud, I had a lot of mist calls. Get it? ‘Mist’ calls?”
“I’m hanging up now, Lou.”
“Al.”
“Say goodbye, Al.”
“Goodbye, Al.”
In my next blog, I meet up with Donovan and finally learn what blockchain is. I also catch up with Charlotte over a cup of coffee. If you’ve been listening to Charlotte’s show on Apple Podcast, you know things have gone from weird to weirder, so naturally I wanted to know how she’s really doing.
###
Tony
Blogger Extraordinaire
DISCLAIMER: The Searching for Salaì podcast and the “Cool Technology and the Intelligent Enterprise” blog series are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
[DESCRIPTION]
Tony’s friend explains how the right Cloud solution creates a common foundation across applications, forging new connections among things, people and processes.
[KEYWORDS]
SAP Leonardo podcast, Innovation, Digital Transformation, Intelligent Enterprise, Analytics, Big Data, Blockchain, The Cloud, Design Thinking, The Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Data Intelligence, Digital Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Searching for Salaì, Cool Technology
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