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What if the world’s hard drives merged into one invisible place—and you used it a hundred times today without thinking? We pull back the curtain on cloud storage, tracing its unlikely path from room-sized machines and punch cards to AWS’s game-changing S3, Dropbox’s frictionless sync, and the moment Netflix stopped shipping envelopes and started streaming the future. Along the way, we unpack why storage got so cheap, how reliability reached “eleven nines,” and where the hidden risks still live.
We start with J.C.R. Licklider’s radical idea—computing as a utility—and follow the thread through ARPANET, early hosting, and the price freefall that turned terabytes into pocket change. Then we shift from enterprise to everyday life: the folder that follows you everywhere, photos that back up before you can worry, and classrooms that collaborate across continents. But convenience has a cost, and we tackle it head on: infamous breaches, painful outages, and the reality that all clouds are built on real servers, power grids, and people. You’ll hear how modern security—encryption by default, MFA, redundancy—raised the bar, and why good hygiene still starts with you.
The story crescendos with Netflix’s bold pivot: betting on bandwidth, partnering with AWS for storage and compute, and building Open Connect to put content near viewers. That playbook—rent the core, own the edge—reshaped entertainment and proved what elastic infrastructure makes possible. We also confront the environmental bill for our “infinite” drive: data centers’ energy appetite, the race to renewables, and why the next leap must be cleaner, not just faster and cheaper. Finally, we look ahead to decentralized storage, edge computing, and AI-guided data management—and face the paradox of abundance: when everything can be saved, deletion becomes a superpower.
If this journey sharpened how you think about the files you trust to the sky, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a quick review. Tell us: what do you trust the cloud with—and what will you delete today?
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Support the show
Art By Sarah/Desmond
Music by Joakim Karud
Little chacha Productions
Juan Rodriguez can be reached at
TikTok @ProfessorJrod
[email protected]
@Prof_JRod
Instagram ProfessorJRod
4.8
2020 ratings
What if the world’s hard drives merged into one invisible place—and you used it a hundred times today without thinking? We pull back the curtain on cloud storage, tracing its unlikely path from room-sized machines and punch cards to AWS’s game-changing S3, Dropbox’s frictionless sync, and the moment Netflix stopped shipping envelopes and started streaming the future. Along the way, we unpack why storage got so cheap, how reliability reached “eleven nines,” and where the hidden risks still live.
We start with J.C.R. Licklider’s radical idea—computing as a utility—and follow the thread through ARPANET, early hosting, and the price freefall that turned terabytes into pocket change. Then we shift from enterprise to everyday life: the folder that follows you everywhere, photos that back up before you can worry, and classrooms that collaborate across continents. But convenience has a cost, and we tackle it head on: infamous breaches, painful outages, and the reality that all clouds are built on real servers, power grids, and people. You’ll hear how modern security—encryption by default, MFA, redundancy—raised the bar, and why good hygiene still starts with you.
The story crescendos with Netflix’s bold pivot: betting on bandwidth, partnering with AWS for storage and compute, and building Open Connect to put content near viewers. That playbook—rent the core, own the edge—reshaped entertainment and proved what elastic infrastructure makes possible. We also confront the environmental bill for our “infinite” drive: data centers’ energy appetite, the race to renewables, and why the next leap must be cleaner, not just faster and cheaper. Finally, we look ahead to decentralized storage, edge computing, and AI-guided data management—and face the paradox of abundance: when everything can be saved, deletion becomes a superpower.
If this journey sharpened how you think about the files you trust to the sky, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a quick review. Tell us: what do you trust the cloud with—and what will you delete today?
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Support the show
Art By Sarah/Desmond
Music by Joakim Karud
Little chacha Productions
Juan Rodriguez can be reached at
TikTok @ProfessorJrod
[email protected]
@Prof_JRod
Instagram ProfessorJRod