Cloud is not a Technology; It’s a Way of Life

I have had a chance to work as a contractor for a private software company in the suburb of New York City on an (sort of) IoT prototype. I was tasked to write a software to interface an arcane equipment with an arduino which will in turn save the retrieved data to the cloud database for further services of web and mobile clients. One evening, my client and I were discussing about a possible sustainable technology stack for the project instead of the Parse service, which had notified us of its closure. I instantly proposed AWS or Google Cloud Platform, if not another backend-less service akin to Parse like Firebase.

Parse’s farewell message. The risk that comes with relying on cloud-based SaaS’s can means a lot to some.

I always thought IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) are direct fruitions of the cloud which bring great accessibility to technology upon someone like myself to a teenager in his dad’s garage hacking away his first app. In a way, cloud empowers and distribute the control of technology much like how personal computers ended the era of room-sized machines controlled by researchers in prestigious laboratories.

After all, I think it is important to just do it fast and fix later. Evaluating technologies for more than a week sounds like a nonsense.

However, my opinion started a mild sparkle of a debate between my client and I. It was one of those I-know-it-all talks usually heard from our fathers and people who feel intimidated by newer waves. Here is a brief semi-dialogue we had: