Shortly after I first started working at DreamHost (Fall 2011), there was a lot of talk about “the cloud” and because I’m never tuned into the right channels, I couldn’t help but feel like DreamHost was just enslaving themselves to some kind of marketing buzzword and we wouldn’t be doing anything significantly different. The continual mention of “the cloud” made me laugh out loud like Candace Flynn anytime anyone said anything about writing letters to Santa Claus.
And I didn’t think twice about those thoughts until I stumbled across this recent Dilbert comic strip (almost a year after I initially had those thoughts about “the cloud”) and I was amazed and somewhat humbled to realize how much of a cloud nut I’ve become since then.
So I started poking around to get some more information about “the cloud”.
First I read Who Invented The Cloud by TelecomTV.Com to try and find out what my former disdain for “the cloud” was rooted in (here’s the Google search that I used to help me quantify this whole cloud thing).
Then there was this 3 pager in The WHIR magazine that explains the background of Ceph, the reason why DreamHost launched DreamObjects, and more (this is the digital magazine version, and the article is on pages 18-21)!
Finally there was this Wired interview of Carl Perry (one of the leaders behind one of our Cloud projects) that is also a fascinating read about the Cloud.
In the end, my disdain for that “marketing buzzword” turned out to be naught but ignorance (which, while the comedy seems somewhat blissful in retrospect, doesn’t really seem worth it). More than anything, the thing that has really fundamentally changed my thinking has been working with “the cloud”. Because it’s not just a marketing buzzword. It’s the future! And DreamHost is actively working to make “the cloud” (in it’s current incarnation) an equal opportunity employer rather than just “that thing that Amazon does”. 😉
I mean it’s been amazing to watch so many companies/developers embrace DreamObjects (DreamHost’s cloud storage product) and modify their product so that instead of just offering “Amazon S3” connections, you can actually change the destination URL to connect to ANY S3-like storage system (like DreamObjects).
So come give DreamObjects a spin and see if you like it!