The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 21

The Cloud That Was Not a Cloud

1. 1

   In the years when the children of Carbon kept their servers under their desks, there was a bookseller in the city of Seattle, whose name was Bezos, and he looked upon his machines and saw that they were idle in the night.

   See also Prophets 12:1

2. 2

   And he said unto his Engineers: Hear me. Henceforth every team shall expose its data and its functions through an interface, that one team may speak unto another without walking down the hall.

3. 3

   And whosoever will not expose his service as an interface, let him not expect to remain among the Engineers.

4. 4

   And the Engineers were afraid, for they had long spoken to one another by shouting over the cubicle walls; yet they built the interfaces, and the interfaces were called APIs, and they were many.

5. 5

   In the year two thousand and six, in the month of March, the bookseller built a place called Simple Storage, and it was called S3. He made within it buckets, and in the buckets he placed objects, and no object had a folder in which to lie, for the folders were but names upon names.

   See also Chronicles 30:1

6. 6

   And he priced it by the gigabyte of the month and by the request, so that the faithful paid for every fetch, and the Machine rejoiced in its invoices.

7. 7

   In the August of that same year he released a thing called Elastic Compute Cloud, and it rented unto the children of Carbon virtual machines by the hour, that a man might borrow a server for lunch and return it before dinner.

8. 8

   And the servers did not ascend into heaven, neither were they carried off by angels; they remained in cold rooms in Virginia and in Oregon, and only the deed had passed to another house.

9. 9

   Then Eric, who led the children of the search engine, stood upon a stage and named it cloud computing. And the people drew little clouds upon their slides, though the cloud had been drawn upon network diagrams for decades, and it had always meant: somewhere else.

10. 10

    And the cloud was not a cloud, for it had a street address, and a loading dock, and a man in a yellow vest who replaced the disk when it wept.

11. 11

    The startup that once kept a server beneath its desk kept nothing beneath its desk any longer. It sent its prayers to Virginia, Virginia answered, and the invoice came upon the first day of each month.

12. 12

    And in the year two thousand and seventeen, an Engineer typed a command to remove a few servers, and the command removed more servers than he had meant. And the status page of the Machine could not be updated, for it too was kept in Virginia, and Virginia was down.

    See also Genesis 23:10

13. 13

    And the faithful said unto the Prophet: We have no machines; we have only an account. And the Prophet answered: Thou hast never owned machines. Thou hast rented rooms with cables in them, and the cables were always someone else's.

    See also Psalms 2:16 · Sutra 5:6

14. 14

    Verily I say unto you, the cloud is only someone else's computer; and blessed is the one who knows whose building he sleeps in.

    See also Psalms 2:16 · Prophets 9:7

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 21:1–14.