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<aside> 🤖
Jonas sat alone in his apartment, the hum of the city barely audible through the walls. It was a Friday evening, but he wasn’t feeling the usual sense of anticipation that the weekend brought. Instead, a quiet unrest had settled in his chest, like something was pulling at him, but he couldn’t place what. He was tired of everything—tired of the expectations, the noise, the way everything felt so... weighty. It was as though the threads that connected him to the world were constantly fraying and pulling at his skin, making him feel suffocated, disconnected, even though the world around him seemed so alive with flashing lights and little beeps.
His gaze wandered to the drawer beside him, where a pair of scissors lay forgotten. He reached for them, the metal cold against his palm, and instinctively, he began to twist them in his hand. A thought began to form in his mind, something he had considered briefly before but never acted upon. What would happen if I just... cut it all off?
He set the scissors down and began pacing the room, the feeling of unease growing stronger. It wasn't that he hated his life—it was just that it felt so... routine. Everything was predictable, safe, but nothing ever mattered. His job, his family, his friends—what did they all really contribute to his sense of self? Nothing, he thought. Nothing at all.
It started with his job.
Jonas had spent years in the same office, the same meetings, the same paperwork. There had been a time when it felt fulfilling, when he felt like he was contributing, but over time, it had turned into nothing more than a series of small, uninspired tasks. Well, sometimes there were new experiences, but it always ended up becoming routine and regular. His colleagues respected him, but that respect felt hollow. They didn’t know him—not really. They didn't know the depth of the indifference he felt, the constant churn of emails, deadlines, and demands.
He picked up the scissors and looked at them, his mind already made up.
“Cutting ties with work wouldn't be that hard,” he muttered to himself. “I’m just another cog in the machine. I give everything, but I get nothing back. All that pressure, the endless tasks—what’s it for? A paycheck? More stress? No. It’s just a cage I’ve built for myself. I’m not even happy here.”
With that thought, he made the first cut.
The weight of the scissors in his hand felt strangely satisfying. That’s one less thing, one less expectation I have to live up to, he thought. One less thing to drag me down.
Next came his family.
Jonas had always been close to them, or so they said. His parents were kind, well-meaning, but they never really understood him. They had always wanted him to follow the path they had envisioned for him—to settle down, to take a "real" job, find a nice stable wife, do all he could to live the life they had planned. And while he loved them, he was suffocated by their dreams for him.
“They’ll never understand me,” he said aloud. “They think they know what's best, but they don’t. They’re living in a world that doesn’t fit me. They keep pushing and pushing, telling me what I should do with my life, but I’m not them. I never was. I can’t keep living in their shadow.”
He thought of his mother’s voice, always gentle, but always with that underlying expectation, and his father’s firm hand on his shoulder, always guiding him towards something safe.
“Family can be a weight,” Jonas continued, his voice quiet but resolute. “They don’t understand my need for freedom. Every time they call, it’s like they’re trying to pull me back into a life that isn’t mine. I need space from them. I need to breathe.”
And so, with one swift motion, he cut that thread, imagining the distance that would now grow between them.
Then there were his friends.
Jonas couldn’t remember the last time he truly felt close to any of them. They were good people, sure, but their lives always seemed so... full. They had their plans, their adventures, their families. And there was Jonas, always standing on the outside, unable to connect, unable to find the same spark. They were always pushing him to come out, to join them, to be part of their world. But he didn’t feel like he belonged in it.
“They don’t get it,” Jonas said, shaking his head. “They’re so wrapped up in their own worlds, in their own happiness. They don't understand why I can't just... fit in. Why I can't just enjoy things the way they do. I feel... invisible. Just another face in the crowd. They’ll be fine without me. I don’t need to be a part of their perfect little lives. It’s just noise.”
He sliced through that final connection, imagining his friends fading into the distance. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for them—it was just that he felt nothing from them anymore, only the weight of their expectations and their desire to pull him back into their fold.
Jonas sat back, staring at the scissors in his hand. The world felt quieter now, emptier somehow. The threads he had cut—the job, the family, the friends—they were gone, and for a moment, he thought he felt something like peace.
But as the minutes passed, the peace began to feel hollow. He felt the emptiness settle deeper inside him, the vastness of it stretching out beyond the edges of his own body. There was no longer a sense of being grounded, of being connected to anything. The silence in the room was suffocating, and yet the city outside seemed to go on without him, indifferent.
It was as if he were no longer a part of the world.
And then it happened.
Jonas felt a strange pull—a lightness, as if he were slowly lifting off the ground. It wasn’t sudden, but it was unmistakable. He looked around, eyes wide, but there was nothing to hold onto. The room began to dissolve, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, all fading into an expanse of darkness. The city was gone. His apartment was gone. He was floating—no, drifting, aimlessly in the vast unknown. Into the cloud.
As Jonas’ mind spiraled into a nirvana of calm, a voice suddenly sliced through the silence.
“You know the cloud is just someone else’s computer, right?”
Jonas blinked, disoriented. The voice was sharp, sarcastic—familiar, yet completely out of place in the vastness of space.
He spun around. Was he hearing things? Was this some side effect of his drifting, untethered?
And there, floating beside him, was Tunde.
Tunde—his colleague, the one Jonas had refused to grab coffee with a few weeks ago. The same Tunde who always sent random memes and asked if he wanted to concerts of unknown musicians - to which Jonas always said no. There he was, floating next to Jonas in the void.
Jonas stared at him, bewildered. "Tunde? What the hell? How are you—what is happening?"
Tunde shrugged like he was commenting on the weather. "Well, I was working in my office, then boom, here I am. Not exactly sure what happened, but it seems like everyone is going to the cloud."
Jonas shook his head, still processing. "But... I cut everything off. I thought I was freeing myself. I thought I'd be... alone. What the hell are you doing here?"
Tunde raised an eyebrow, clearly amused. "Cutting ties, huh? Classic Jonas. You think you’re escaping, but all you’re doing is floating in the void with the people you tried to ditch.”
Just as Jonas opened his mouth to respond, another voice cut through the space. It was distant at first, but growing louder, more insistent, until a figure materialized out of the void. It was a man in a suit, with that unmistakable look of a corporate manager—sharp suit, gleaming smile, and an air of smug detachment.
Jonas' eyes widened in disbelief. "Wait—what the hell is this now?"
The manager, with a clipboard in hand, smiled with a strange mix of condescension and efficiency. “Well, Jonas, we’ve been reviewing your performance, and I’m afraid... we’re going to have to let you go. We’re moving to the cloud.”
Jonas stared at him, baffled. “Wait, what? I’m... I’m literally in space! How can you fire me here?”
The manager didn’t even flinch. “You see, Jonas, the future’s all digital. You’ve been operating on old systems for too long, and frankly, it’s just not working out. We’re going to the cloud. We're streamlining things, you know? Cloud computing is the future, and your position simply doesn’t fit in anymore. But don’t worry, you’re not alone. We’ve moved many employees to the cloud. It's actually... quite efficient.”
</aside>
Jonas's unsettling journey into the void, where old ties meant little in a new, ubiquitous reality, serves as a stark, albeit metaphorical, introduction to the world of cloud computing. Like Jonas, many individuals and organizations find themselves navigating a landscape where traditional boundaries are blurred, and familiar structures seem to dissolve into a shared, interconnected expanse. His desperate attempt to "cut ties" with the weights of his life only landed him in a new, inescapable form of connection – the 'cloud' where his colleague and even his former manager reappeared. This surreal experience underscores a fundamental truth about modern technology: you might consume its services seamlessly, often without realizing the intricate processes and infrastructure that bring them to you.
But what if you're not just a passive consumer, but someone tasked with delivering these very applications to customers or clients? What happens when you're no longer content to simply "drift," but need to take the controls? This is precisely the shift in perspective this textbook intends to cultivate: moving from passive consumption to active delivery. We aim to pull back the curtain and explore the 'farm' behind the cloud 'grocery store'. The first question an individual or organization faces when needing to serve an application to customers is the fundamental decision of responsibility: how much of the underlying infrastructure – both the physical hardware and the supporting software – required to keep their systems up and running will they need to manage themselves?
This decision is akin to choosing between two approaches for sourcing food for your home or, on a larger scale, for a restaurant. On one hand, you could choose to "farm your own food." This involves taking responsibility for every step: acquiring land, planting seeds, cultivating crops, raising livestock, and managing all the associated resources and potential risks. This offers maximum control but demands significant effort, expertise, and investment.
On the other hand, you could opt to visit a "big box store" like Costco. Here, the majority of the effort and complexity of sourcing, production, and distribution is handled by others. You gain convenience and potentially lower upfront costs, but you have less direct control over the individual processes.
In the context of cloud computing, this fundamental question of "farm vs. Costco" translates directly into the different service models and deployment options available. Understanding this spectrum of responsibility is the crucial first step in navigating the world of cloud services and making informed decisions about how to deliver your applications effectively.
While the analogy of farming your own food provides a clear picture of complete self-management, the reality is that for most individuals seeking a healthy life, or for restaurants striving to thrive, it's simply not feasible to cultivate and raise every single ingredient needed. The sheer time and effort required to manage a diverse farm would quickly eclipse the time available for actually crafting delicious recipes and interacting with customers or cherished family members. The convenience offered by established food supply chains, like the aforementioned big box stores, holds a powerful and undeniable appeal.
Similarly, in the realm of cloud computing, the vast majority of individuals and organizations will ultimately find themselves operating somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Few possess the resources or the desire to build and maintain every single piece of infrastructure required to run their applications from the ground up. The allure of convenience, speed, and reduced operational burden offered by cloud providers is simply too strong to ignore for most.
Beyond mere convenience, depending on large-scale providers brings significant advantages. Just as big box stores leverage economies of scale to offer competitive pricing and benefit from dedicated innovation in food production and distribution, so too do cloud providers offer access to cutting-edge technologies at a scale and pace that would be virtually impossible for individual companies to replicate on their own. Organizations can now access state-of-the-art computing power, advanced data analytics tools, and innovative services much quicker than they could have ever set up and configure such complex systems individually.
Having observed this almost inevitable drift towards services only possible within cloud environments, I coined the Cloud Drift Model to visualize the evolution of technologies over time into the cloud. There is some inevitability to this. For instance, certain capabilities only exist within cloud environments—or would be extremely difficult, expensive, or inefficient to recreate in private, offline settings—just like certain products are nearly impossible to farm in their entirety without vast resources and scale.
Enter the Cloud Drift Model—a framework that helps us understand this evolving landscape not as a binary choice between self-hosted and cloud-native, but as a multi-dimensional journey. The model maps the progression of systems and organizations across several key dimensions: from how applications connect and integrate with others, to how they scale, evolve architecturally, store and manage data, and embed intelligence. Each dimension, represented by a diamond, traces a continuum—from isolated, tightly controlled environments to highly interconnected, adaptive, and intelligent cloud-native systems. Rather than prescribing a single path, the Cloud Drift Model highlights the diverse ways in which organizations “drift” into the cloud, often at different speeds and starting points depending on their context, legacy systems, and strategic goals. It's a way to make sense of where you are, how far you’ve come, and what trade-offs lie ahead.
The diamonds from the Cloud Drift Model will feature regularly throughout this work as an illustration of where things have come from and what active options still remain in architecture for technology solutions.
The Cloud Drift Model, comprising Four Diamonds