October 19, 2025 • 25 mins
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?
Interviews with Tech Leaders and insights on the latest emerging technology trends.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Art By Sarah/Desmond
Music by Joakim Karud
Little chacha Productions
Juan Rodriguez can be reached at
TikTok @ProfessorJrod
ProfessorJRod@gmail.com
@Prof_JRod
Instagram ProfessorJRod
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_01 (00:28):
Welcome to the technology.
This is a few light of thefinal.
(01:08):
All right, welcome back toTechnology Tap.
I'm Professor J.
Rod.
For those of you who don't knowus, I am a real college
professor and I like to helpstudents pass their A, network
plus, and Security Plus exam.
I also am a little bit of ahistory buff.
So what I'm doing now with thesepodcasts is I'm doing lessons on
(01:30):
A, lessons on Security Plus, andthen on Sundays I drop uh, you
know, a history of computing.
Since history is uh you know alittle bit of a hobby of mine
that I like doing.
So hopefully you're enjoyingthese.
I do these three three days aweek.
I record them the same day andthen I I release them in on
(01:52):
Tuesdays, Thursdays, andSundays.
So if you're listening to this,this is for the first time that
I release it.
It's probably be on a Sunday.
And usually Sundays is thehistory one that I like to do.
So welcome back.
Sit back and let's learn aboutthe rise of the cloud.
So today we're gonna explore aworld that you can't see, you
(02:14):
can't touch, then you rely on itevery single day.
You save a document, share aphoto, back up your phone, and
somewhere out there in a vastnetwork of machines you never
ever visit, your data lives andbreathes.
We call it the cloud.
But what is it?
Who built it?
How did it go from a nicheconcept in the 60s to the
(02:36):
foundation of modern life?
And how did something that oncecalled thousands of dollars per
month become free for billionsof people?
Today we'll journey through thebirth, growth, and dominance of
cloud storage, the invisiblearchitecture of our digital age.
Let's rewind to the early 1960s.
Computers filled a room, theyhummed the world and demanded
(02:58):
punch cards.
A computer was not personal, itwas institutional.
But a few visionary thinkersimagined something radical.
What if computing power could bedelivered like electricity as a
utility?
That idea came from JCRLickleiter, a psychologist
technologist who worked forARPA, the Advanced Research
(03:18):
Project Agency.
Lickleiter dreamed of anintergalactic computer network,
machines linked together,sharing data and applications
over long distance.
That sounds familiar, rightguys?
Now it's called the Internet.
In 1962, the cloud was still adream, but the dream had a name,
connectivity.
As networks evolved through the70s and 80s, ARPNET, NSFnet, and
(03:42):
finally the early internet,storage stayed physical.
Hard drives spun in offices,backups lived on tape.
If your building caught fire, sodid your data, but everything
was about to change.
In the 1990s, companies beganexperimenting with hosting.
You can rent a web server, aphysical machine, in someone
else's data center, and storeyour files there.
(04:02):
This was the first taste of whatwe later called cloud storage.
Early services like XDrivelaunched in 1999 and iDrive
offered small amounts of onlinespace.
Their prices about$20 a monthfor 50 megs.
That's one PowerPoint decktoday.
One PowerPoint deck by today'sstandard.
(04:32):
The cloud began not with a stormbut a drizzle, a few megabytes
falling from the sky.
Then came 2006, the year the skytruly opened up.
In 2006, Amazon Web Server AWSlaunched S3, Simple Storage
Service.
At the time, Amazon was bestknown from selling books.
(04:54):
Behind the scenes, though, itsengineers have built a powerful
internal infrastructure tomanage millions of customers'
requests every day.
Someone inside asked themillion-dollar question if this
system can store your data, whynot everybody's?
AWS S3 was born.
It was the first true commercialcloud storage platform.
Scalable, programmable, pay asyou go, you only pay for what
(05:18):
you use.
Initial price in 2006 was 15cents per gigabyte per month and
20 cents per gigabytedownloaded.
Compare that to$20 for 50 megfrom a decade earlier, a 99.9%
collapse.
AWS made storage or service.
(05:38):
Developers no longer boughtservers, they rented space in
the sky.
Startups can launch without everowning hardware or paying a
tech, right?
Which is always a big thing.
Not having to worry aboutsecurity, not having to worry
about patches, like that's a lotof money being saved.
AWS didn't just change pricing,it changed possibilities.
(06:02):
While AWS empowered business,the rest of us needed something
simple.
A folder that follows useverywhere.
In 2007, two MIT students, DrewHouston and Arish Ferdashi,
launched Dropbox.
The story goes that Houston keptforgetting his USB drive and
thought, why can't my files justbe everywhere I am?
(06:23):
Dropbox made syncing invisible.
Drag a file into a folder on onecomputer and it magically
appears on another.
Early plans, price plans in2008, 2 gigabits free tier and
$9.99 per month for a 50 gig Proaccount.
Today, 2TB cost you$11.99 permonth, and a price plan with
(06:46):
unlimited storage go around$20per user.
Dropbox did for storage whatGmail did for email.
It made it personal, seamless,and invisible.
Soon the race was on.
2012 Google Drive, 15 gig free,backed by Google's massive
server farms.
Microsoft OneDrive 2014 builtinto Windows and Office 365.
(07:11):
Apple iCloud 2011 integratedinto iPhones and the Mac
ecosystem.
The cloud went mainstream.
By 2015, even grandparents werebacking up photos automatically
without realizing they wereusing the same technology that
powered Fortune 500 companies.
The cloud stopped being adestination and became default.
(07:32):
Now let's talk numbers becausethe economics of cloud storage
are fascinating as thetechnology itself.
In 2006, AWS charged 15 centsper gigabyte.
By 2025, that price has fallento 0.05 per gigabyte, a ten-fold
drop.
Our terabyte of online storagethat once cost 150 now costs$15
(07:57):
or less.
Customers' plans follow suit.
2008, Dropbox, 50 GB, 999 amonth.
2012, Google Drive, 100GB, 499 amonth.
2025, 2TB,$9.99 a month fromGoogle.
In 2025, iCloud 2TB is$9.99.
In 2005, AWS S3, 1 TB forbusiness use, is$15 total
(08:22):
storage plus usage fee.
Every decade, a zero disappearsfrom the bill.
Cloud providers can charge solittle because they achieve
economies of scale.
A single data center can storehundreds of petabytes with power
efficiency no individual companycould match.
But that scale comes with a newcost, dependence.
(08:44):
When data leaves your hard driveand enters somebody else's
responsibility and sometimessomeone else's risk.
The first major cloud breach hitin 2011 when Sony's PlayStation
Network was hacked, exposingmillions of accounts and credit
cards.
Later that year, Amazon AWSouledge knocked hundreds of
websites offline for hours, fromReddit to Quora.
(09:07):
Each incident reminded us thatthe cloud is still a physical
place with servers, power grids,and humans who make mistakes.
Then came the Dropbox Breach of2012, the Apple Cloud Photo
Incident of 2014, and theCapital One AWS misconfiguration
of 2019.
Each story underscores the samelesson: convenience without
(09:29):
security is a trap.
We moved our data to the sky andthey realized it still casts a
shadow.
That's why modern clouds encryptdata in transit and at rest, use
multi-factor authentication, anddistributed redundant copies
across continents.
Amazon boasts an 119savailability.
(09:51):
That's 99.99999999% dataretention.
In theory, you can store amillion files from 100 years and
lose only one.
The cloud never forgets, andthat's both a feature and a
warning.
Today, cloud storage is not aservice, it's an infrastructure
of civilization.
Governments archive records onAWS GovCloud.
(10:14):
Netflix streams from Amazonservers.
Apple backs up 2 billion iPhonesthrough iCloud.
Google Drive houses billions ofdocuments created by students
and teachers worldwide.
In 2025, there are 7 milliondata centers around the world,
from Oregon to Dublin toJohannesburg, each one a
cathedral of light andelectricity.
(10:36):
The cloud has no nation, yet ittouches them all.
Of course, storing everything inthe sky still has a cost, an
environmental one.
Data centers consume about 2% ofthe global electricity.
Companies like Google andMicrosoft are investing in solar
and wind power, even underwatercooling projects to cut heat.
In 2023, Microsoft pledged torun all Azure data centers at
(11:00):
100% renewable energy by 2030.
Amazon announced its climbpledge data centers carbon
neutral by 2030.
The next evolution of cloudstorage isn't faster or cheaper.
It's cleaner.
Yeah, they the the whole worldis worried about that with the
(11:20):
cloud, that it's the electricitythat it's consuming.
This thing consumes a lot ofelectricity.
And more and more people, moreand more, not only people
companies are becoming more andmore dependent on the cloud.
And it's a you know it's aconcern.
Like how do we how do weconserve energy that we need
(11:42):
instead of giving it to thecloud?
And and my own concern is, youknow, what it's not a question
of of if, it's when the lightsgo out.
What's gonna happen with allthat data?
Right?
If you have data in a differentcomp country and the lights go
out, won't you be afraid aboutyour data?
(12:04):
I mean, this is you know,there's a lot of things.
We everybody likes new and fancythings.
And it's nice.
But once they get it, then theyrealize, oh, wait a minute.
Right?
And then and I'll give you theperfect example.
Like I'm going through it rightnow with the liquid glass on on
(12:24):
Apple.
It's great, it looks nice, butman, it's clunky.
It's it's clunky.
So, you know, we we all waitedfor that.
We all wanted them to have a uha decent upgrade, and now that
they did it, I'm not happy withit.
Alright, let's continue.
Think about how the cloudchanged daily life.
(12:45):
Students collaborate on GoogleDocs in real time from different
continents.
Families share photo albums thatauto-update across devices.
Podcasters like me upload videosto the cloud so listeners
everywhere can press playinstantly.
Entire industries exist becausestorage no longer limits
imagination.
Netflix and Spotify streaming,Zoom meetings, cloud gaming
(13:08):
platforms, AI training data setsspanning petabytes.
The cloud turned computing froma product into a place.
(13:43):
Now what comes next?
The cloud is already shiftingtowards decentralized storage
and edge computing.
Projects like SOAR, Filecoin,and IPFS use blockchain
technologies to distribute dataacross independent nodes.
Instead of trusting one giantcompany, your files are broken
into pieces and stalled aroundthe world, encrypted, redundant,
(14:05):
and resistant.
Meanwhile, AI drives intelligentstorage, systems that predict
which files you need before youeven open it.
And quantum storage reach ispushing the limits of physics,
storing bits of information inatoms and photons.
We used to ask where our datawas, now we ask what it would
become.
(14:25):
Here's a paradox.
We made storage so cheap that wehardly think about it.
But our digital footprint neverstops growing.
In 2000, humanity stored 40exabytes data in total.
By 2025, we'll cross 200zatabytes.
At a penny per gigabyte, themask still works, but the planet
(14:45):
feels the weight.
When storage becomes infinite,what becomes precious is
deletion.
Alright, let's talk about acompany that made a big change
to this cloud and it was a bigsuccess.
It's 2001.
Netflix is a runaway success.
They have 4 million subscribers,they're emailing a million DVDs
(15:07):
per day.
And their red envelopes are asiconic as the Coca-Cola cans.
Each disc travels from one of 40distribution centers across
America.
It's a ballet of logistics,scanning, sorting, sealing, and
shipping.
Every envelope costs 78 cents inpostage and handling, but
customers love it.
Movies at your doorstep, no latefees, no waiting in line.
(15:30):
For Netflix, it was comfortable,profitable, predictable, but
Reed Hastings, the co-founderand CEO, wasn't interested in
comfort.
He was looking at somethingelse, something invisible.
If a business waits until changeis obvious, then it's already
too late.
Around the same time, theinternet was quietly gaining
faster.
In 2000, the average homeconnection ran at 56 kilobits
(15:52):
per second.
Enough for email, barely enoughfor images.
By 2005, broadband has leaped to2 megabytes per second.
Not blazing speed by today'sstandards, but enough to do
something remarkable.
Stream a movie.
Hastings saw the numbers.
He saw that every year morehouseholds were moving from
dollop to broadband.
And he asked himself a radicalquestion.
(16:14):
What happens when the internetspeeds are fast enough to
deliver a video instantly?
Technology doesn't wait forpermission.
It moves at the speed ofcuriosity.
He knew that if Netflix didn'tembrace streaming, someone else
would.
Inside Netflix, not everyoneagreed.
DVDs was still booming,customers loved the red
envelope.
(16:34):
Streaming felt risky.
The infrastructure, the rights,the playback technologies, all
uncertain.
But Hastings put forward, pushedforward.
He wasn't just becoming bettingon Netflix, he was betting on
the internet itself.
In meetings, he would say, we'renot a DVD company.
We're a delivery company.
DVDs are today's deliverysystem.
(16:54):
Streaming is tomorrow.
Leaders don't predict thefuture, they prepare for it.
In 2007, Netflix faced atechnical mountain.
If they're going to streamvideos to millions of users,
they need data centers, massiveones.
Servers to store servers to hostterabytes of movies, networks to
(17:16):
handle millions of simultaneousrequests, storage system to
never lose a single customerfile.
Building that from scratch wouldhave cost hundreds of millions
of dollars.
So Netflix turned to anothercompany that was quietly
reinventing itself.
Just a year earlier, Amazon hadlaunched Amazon Web Services, a
(17:36):
cloud platform that rented outcompeting power and storage to
other companies.
Netflix saw a perfect fit.
Instead of buying physicalservers, they will rent digital
space in the cloud.
AWS would hold Netflix growinglibrary.
AWS EC2 will process requests,manage screen streams, and scale
up or down depending on demand.
(17:57):
The two companies once rival ine-commerce became partners in
infrastructure.
Sometimes your featurescompetitor is your best
collaborator.
By 2009, Netflix had fullymigrated its video encoding and
storage to AWS.
When you press play, your moviedidn't come from a Netflix
warehouse.
It streamed from Amazon Cloud.
(18:19):
That same year, Netflix flippedthe switch.
They launched Watch Now, afeature allowing subscribers to
stream movies through their webbrowsers.
The library was small, just athousand titles.
The quality was modest, standarddefinition, and it only worked
on Windows PC.
But it was a spark that wouldignite an entire industry.
(18:40):
Revolutions rarely begin withperfection, they begin with
possibilities.
Streaming wasn't just aninnovation, it was survival.
DVD shipping costs were eatinginto margins, postage was rising
every year.
Handling millions of physicaldisks meant warehouse labor and
loss.
Streaming flipped that equation.
No envelopes, no scratches, noinventory.
(19:02):
Once a movie was uploaded, itcould be watched an infinite
number of times.
It was scalability, a word thatdefined the 21st century.
When you stop shipping productsand start shipping data, the
ceiling disappears.
Netflix didn't just store datain the cloud, it learned to move
it efficiently.
They built their own contentdelivery network called Open
(19:25):
Connect, deploying Netflixservers inside major internet
service providers around theworld.
When you hit play, the streamdoesn't travel from Seattle to
Virginia.
It often comes from a nearbycity, maybe your neighborhood.
That's why your streaming rarelybuffers.
It's local, cached, optimized.
(19:45):
The internet may feel infinite,but speed is all about
proximity.
By partnering with AWS for cloudinfrastructure and building Open
Connect for distribution,Netflix created one of the most
reliable streaming services inthe world.
Once streaming worked, thequestion was what to stream.
Licensing deals with Hollywoodwas expensive.
(20:08):
Netflix realized they couldn'trely on other studios forever.
So they started producing theirown shows, the first big one
being House of Cards in 2013.
It wasn't just about content, itwas about control.
Owning the content meant Netflixowned the data, the audience,
and the brand.
It transformed from adistribution into a studio and
(20:29):
later into a globalentertainment powerhouse.
Streaming wasn't thedestination, it was the doorway.
When Netflix made thetransition, investors were
nervous.
DVD rentals brought steadyprofits.
Streaming was uncertain.
But Hastings had data, and datatold the story.
A single streaming customer costless than half as much to serve
(20:51):
as a DVD by mail subscriber.
Every hour streamed was an hoursaved on postage, packaging, and
returns.
By 2012, the numbers were clear.
Streaming brought in highermargins and global scalability.
The DVD model couldn't followthe company into the future.
Every breakthrough is also abreakup, saying goodbye to what
(21:12):
once worked.
By the early 2010s, streaminghas surpassed physical rentals.
By 2023, Netflix mailed itsfinal DVD, closing the chapter
that started it all.
The red envelopes gave away tothe red pixels, the Netflix end
lighting up the screens aroundthe world.
They stopped delivering discsand started delivering
(21:34):
experiences.
Netflix's decision to move fromDVD to streaming wasn't just
about convenience.
It was about anticipatingbehavior.
They saw people didn't wantmovies in the mail.
They wanted stories on demand.
Anytime, anywhere, any device.
That vision redefined how weconsume media, how networks
deliver it, and how technologyserves creativity.
(21:57):
And it wouldn't have beenpossible without one key
partnership, Amazon WebServices, whose cloud turned
Netflix stream into a livingstreaming reality.
The future isn't a new product,it's a new perspective.
So, to close it out, and by theway, I'm going to do a history
of more of a deep dive into thehistory of all these services,
(22:19):
Amazon Web Services, Netflix,all that, you know, in uh in
future Sunday episodes.
So don't you worry.
I only did a snippet of Netflix,of, you know, we didn't even get
in touch about their potentialmerger with Blockbuster back in
the day, but we will get into ituh at some point.
(22:40):
All right, from JCRLicklighter's Dream in 1962 to
Amazon S3 in 2006, to theinvisible networks that back up
your phone.
At night, the cloud hasfulfilled a promise.
Computing as a utility,accessible to all.
Initial price was staggering,$20for 50 megs.
Today, billions enjoy gigabytesfor free.
(23:02):
What began as a way to storefiles became the backbone of
communication, business, andcreativity.
But the real story of the cloudisn't in the servers, it's in
us, the people who trust,upload, share, and create within
it.
We built the cloud to hold ourdata, and in return, it holds
our digital lives.
So next time you drag a file tothe cloud, take a moment to
(23:23):
appreciate the invisibleinfrastructure carrying your
world.
From the garage innovators tothe global giants who turn a
dream into the digital sky.
I'm Professor Jrod and this hasbeen Technology Tap.
So next time, stay grounded,stay curious, and keep tapping
into technology.
(23:50):
This has been a presentation ofLittle Toucha Productions art by
Sabra, used by Joe Kim.
We're now part of the Pod MacNetwork.
You can follow me at TikTok atProfessor J Rod at J R O D, or
you can email me atprofessorjrod at J R O D at
Gmail.com.
Welcome to the technology.
This is a few light of thefinal.
(01:08):
All right, welcome back toTechnology Tap.
I'm Professor J.
Rod.
For those of you who don't knowus, I am a real college
professor and I like to helpstudents pass their A, network
plus, and Security Plus exam.
I also am a little bit of ahistory buff.
So what I'm doing now with thesepodcasts is I'm doing lessons on
(01:30):
A, lessons on Security Plus, andthen on Sundays I drop uh, you
know, a history of computing.
Since history is uh you know alittle bit of a hobby of mine
that I like doing.
So hopefully you're enjoyingthese.
I do these three three days aweek.
I record them the same day andthen I I release them in on
(01:52):
Tuesdays, Thursdays, andSundays.
So if you're listening to this,this is for the first time that
I release it.
It's probably be on a Sunday.
And usually Sundays is thehistory one that I like to do.
So welcome back.
Sit back and let's learn aboutthe rise of the cloud.
So today we're gonna explore aworld that you can't see, you
(02:14):
can't touch, then you rely on itevery single day.
You save a document, share aphoto, back up your phone, and
somewhere out there in a vastnetwork of machines you never
ever visit, your data lives andbreathes.
We call it the cloud.
But what is it?
Who built it?
How did it go from a nicheconcept in the 60s to the
(02:36):
foundation of modern life?
And how did something that oncecalled thousands of dollars per
month become free for billionsof people?
Today we'll journey through thebirth, growth, and dominance of
cloud storage, the invisiblearchitecture of our digital age.
Let's rewind to the early 1960s.
Computers filled a room, theyhummed the world and demanded
(02:58):
punch cards.
A computer was not personal, itwas institutional.
But a few visionary thinkersimagined something radical.
What if computing power could bedelivered like electricity as a
utility?
That idea came from JCRLickleiter, a psychologist
technologist who worked forARPA, the Advanced Research
(03:18):
Project Agency.
Lickleiter dreamed of anintergalactic computer network,
machines linked together,sharing data and applications
over long distance.
That sounds familiar, rightguys?
Now it's called the Internet.
In 1962, the cloud was still adream, but the dream had a name,
connectivity.
As networks evolved through the70s and 80s, ARPNET, NSFnet, and
(03:42):
finally the early internet,storage stayed physical.
Hard drives spun in offices,backups lived on tape.
If your building caught fire, sodid your data, but everything
was about to change.
In the 1990s, companies beganexperimenting with hosting.
You can rent a web server, aphysical machine, in someone
else's data center, and storeyour files there.
(04:02):
This was the first taste of whatwe later called cloud storage.
Early services like XDrivelaunched in 1999 and iDrive
offered small amounts of onlinespace.
Their prices about$20 a monthfor 50 megs.
That's one PowerPoint decktoday.
One PowerPoint deck by today'sstandard.
(04:32):
The cloud began not with a stormbut a drizzle, a few megabytes
falling from the sky.
Then came 2006, the year the skytruly opened up.
In 2006, Amazon Web Server AWSlaunched S3, Simple Storage
Service.
At the time, Amazon was bestknown from selling books.
(04:54):
Behind the scenes, though, itsengineers have built a powerful
internal infrastructure tomanage millions of customers'
requests every day.
Someone inside asked themillion-dollar question if this
system can store your data, whynot everybody's?
AWS S3 was born.
It was the first true commercialcloud storage platform.
Scalable, programmable, pay asyou go, you only pay for what
(05:18):
you use.
Initial price in 2006 was 15cents per gigabyte per month and
20 cents per gigabytedownloaded.
Compare that to$20 for 50 megfrom a decade earlier, a 99.9%
collapse.
AWS made storage or service.
(05:38):
Developers no longer boughtservers, they rented space in
the sky.
Startups can launch without everowning hardware or paying a
tech, right?
Which is always a big thing.
Not having to worry aboutsecurity, not having to worry
about patches, like that's a lotof money being saved.
AWS didn't just change pricing,it changed possibilities.
(06:02):
While AWS empowered business,the rest of us needed something
simple.
A folder that follows useverywhere.
In 2007, two MIT students, DrewHouston and Arish Ferdashi,
launched Dropbox.
The story goes that Houston keptforgetting his USB drive and
thought, why can't my files justbe everywhere I am?
(06:23):
Dropbox made syncing invisible.
Drag a file into a folder on onecomputer and it magically
appears on another.
Early plans, price plans in2008, 2 gigabits free tier and
$9.99 per month for a 50 gig Proaccount.
Today, 2TB cost you$11.99 permonth, and a price plan with
(06:46):
unlimited storage go around$20per user.
Dropbox did for storage whatGmail did for email.
It made it personal, seamless,and invisible.
Soon the race was on.
2012 Google Drive, 15 gig free,backed by Google's massive
server farms.
Microsoft OneDrive 2014 builtinto Windows and Office 365.
(07:11):
Apple iCloud 2011 integratedinto iPhones and the Mac
ecosystem.
The cloud went mainstream.
By 2015, even grandparents werebacking up photos automatically
without realizing they wereusing the same technology that
powered Fortune 500 companies.
The cloud stopped being adestination and became default.
(07:32):
Now let's talk numbers becausethe economics of cloud storage
are fascinating as thetechnology itself.
In 2006, AWS charged 15 centsper gigabyte.
By 2025, that price has fallento 0.05 per gigabyte, a ten-fold
drop.
Our terabyte of online storagethat once cost 150 now costs$15
(07:57):
or less.
Customers' plans follow suit.
2008, Dropbox, 50 GB, 999 amonth.
2012, Google Drive, 100GB, 499 amonth.
2025, 2TB,$9.99 a month fromGoogle.
In 2025, iCloud 2TB is$9.99.
In 2005, AWS S3, 1 TB forbusiness use, is$15 total
(08:22):
storage plus usage fee.
Every decade, a zero disappearsfrom the bill.
Cloud providers can charge solittle because they achieve
economies of scale.
A single data center can storehundreds of petabytes with power
efficiency no individual companycould match.
But that scale comes with a newcost, dependence.
(08:44):
When data leaves your hard driveand enters somebody else's
responsibility and sometimessomeone else's risk.
The first major cloud breach hitin 2011 when Sony's PlayStation
Network was hacked, exposingmillions of accounts and credit
cards.
Later that year, Amazon AWSouledge knocked hundreds of
websites offline for hours, fromReddit to Quora.
(09:07):
Each incident reminded us thatthe cloud is still a physical
place with servers, power grids,and humans who make mistakes.
Then came the Dropbox Breach of2012, the Apple Cloud Photo
Incident of 2014, and theCapital One AWS misconfiguration
of 2019.
Each story underscores the samelesson: convenience without
(09:29):
security is a trap.
We moved our data to the sky andthey realized it still casts a
shadow.
That's why modern clouds encryptdata in transit and at rest, use
multi-factor authentication, anddistributed redundant copies
across continents.
Amazon boasts an 119savailability.
(09:51):
That's 99.99999999% dataretention.
In theory, you can store amillion files from 100 years and
lose only one.
The cloud never forgets, andthat's both a feature and a
warning.
Today, cloud storage is not aservice, it's an infrastructure
of civilization.
Governments archive records onAWS GovCloud.
(10:14):
Netflix streams from Amazonservers.
Apple backs up 2 billion iPhonesthrough iCloud.
Google Drive houses billions ofdocuments created by students
and teachers worldwide.
In 2025, there are 7 milliondata centers around the world,
from Oregon to Dublin toJohannesburg, each one a
cathedral of light andelectricity.
(10:36):
The cloud has no nation, yet ittouches them all.
Of course, storing everything inthe sky still has a cost, an
environmental one.
Data centers consume about 2% ofthe global electricity.
Companies like Google andMicrosoft are investing in solar
and wind power, even underwatercooling projects to cut heat.
In 2023, Microsoft pledged torun all Azure data centers at
(11:00):
100% renewable energy by 2030.
Amazon announced its climbpledge data centers carbon
neutral by 2030.
The next evolution of cloudstorage isn't faster or cheaper.
It's cleaner.
Yeah, they the the whole worldis worried about that with the
(11:20):
cloud, that it's the electricitythat it's consuming.
This thing consumes a lot ofelectricity.
And more and more people, moreand more, not only people
companies are becoming more andmore dependent on the cloud.
And it's a you know it's aconcern.
Like how do we how do weconserve energy that we need
(11:42):
instead of giving it to thecloud?
And and my own concern is, youknow, what it's not a question
of of if, it's when the lightsgo out.
What's gonna happen with allthat data?
Right?
If you have data in a differentcomp country and the lights go
out, won't you be afraid aboutyour data?
(12:04):
I mean, this is you know,there's a lot of things.
We everybody likes new and fancythings.
And it's nice.
But once they get it, then theyrealize, oh, wait a minute.
Right?
And then and I'll give you theperfect example.
Like I'm going through it rightnow with the liquid glass on on
(12:24):
Apple.
It's great, it looks nice, butman, it's clunky.
It's it's clunky.
So, you know, we we all waitedfor that.
We all wanted them to have a uha decent upgrade, and now that
they did it, I'm not happy withit.
Alright, let's continue.
Think about how the cloudchanged daily life.
(12:45):
Students collaborate on GoogleDocs in real time from different
continents.
Families share photo albums thatauto-update across devices.
Podcasters like me upload videosto the cloud so listeners
everywhere can press playinstantly.
Entire industries exist becausestorage no longer limits
imagination.
Netflix and Spotify streaming,Zoom meetings, cloud gaming
(13:08):
platforms, AI training data setsspanning petabytes.
The cloud turned computing froma product into a place.
(13:43):
Now what comes next?
The cloud is already shiftingtowards decentralized storage
and edge computing.
Projects like SOAR, Filecoin,and IPFS use blockchain
technologies to distribute dataacross independent nodes.
Instead of trusting one giantcompany, your files are broken
into pieces and stalled aroundthe world, encrypted, redundant,
(14:05):
and resistant.
Meanwhile, AI drives intelligentstorage, systems that predict
which files you need before youeven open it.
And quantum storage reach ispushing the limits of physics,
storing bits of information inatoms and photons.
We used to ask where our datawas, now we ask what it would
become.
(14:25):
Here's a paradox.
We made storage so cheap that wehardly think about it.
But our digital footprint neverstops growing.
In 2000, humanity stored 40exabytes data in total.
By 2025, we'll cross 200zatabytes.
At a penny per gigabyte, themask still works, but the planet
(14:45):
feels the weight.
When storage becomes infinite,what becomes precious is
deletion.
Alright, let's talk about acompany that made a big change
to this cloud and it was a bigsuccess.
It's 2001.
Netflix is a runaway success.
They have 4 million subscribers,they're emailing a million DVDs
(15:07):
per day.
And their red envelopes are asiconic as the Coca-Cola cans.
Each disc travels from one of 40distribution centers across
America.
It's a ballet of logistics,scanning, sorting, sealing, and
shipping.
Every envelope costs 78 cents inpostage and handling, but
customers love it.
Movies at your doorstep, no latefees, no waiting in line.
(15:30):
For Netflix, it was comfortable,profitable, predictable, but
Reed Hastings, the co-founderand CEO, wasn't interested in
comfort.
He was looking at somethingelse, something invisible.
If a business waits until changeis obvious, then it's already
too late.
Around the same time, theinternet was quietly gaining
faster.
In 2000, the average homeconnection ran at 56 kilobits
(15:52):
per second.
Enough for email, barely enoughfor images.
By 2005, broadband has leaped to2 megabytes per second.
Not blazing speed by today'sstandards, but enough to do
something remarkable.
Stream a movie.
Hastings saw the numbers.
He saw that every year morehouseholds were moving from
dollop to broadband.
And he asked himself a radicalquestion.
(16:14):
What happens when the internetspeeds are fast enough to
deliver a video instantly?
Technology doesn't wait forpermission.
It moves at the speed ofcuriosity.
He knew that if Netflix didn'tembrace streaming, someone else
would.
Inside Netflix, not everyoneagreed.
DVDs was still booming,customers loved the red
envelope.
(16:34):
Streaming felt risky.
The infrastructure, the rights,the playback technologies, all
uncertain.
But Hastings put forward, pushedforward.
He wasn't just becoming bettingon Netflix, he was betting on
the internet itself.
In meetings, he would say, we'renot a DVD company.
We're a delivery company.
DVDs are today's deliverysystem.
(16:54):
Streaming is tomorrow.
Leaders don't predict thefuture, they prepare for it.
In 2007, Netflix faced atechnical mountain.
If they're going to streamvideos to millions of users,
they need data centers, massiveones.
Servers to store servers to hostterabytes of movies, networks to
(17:16):
handle millions of simultaneousrequests, storage system to
never lose a single customerfile.
Building that from scratch wouldhave cost hundreds of millions
of dollars.
So Netflix turned to anothercompany that was quietly
reinventing itself.
Just a year earlier, Amazon hadlaunched Amazon Web Services, a
(17:36):
cloud platform that rented outcompeting power and storage to
other companies.
Netflix saw a perfect fit.
Instead of buying physicalservers, they will rent digital
space in the cloud.
AWS would hold Netflix growinglibrary.
AWS EC2 will process requests,manage screen streams, and scale
up or down depending on demand.
(17:57):
The two companies once rival ine-commerce became partners in
infrastructure.
Sometimes your featurescompetitor is your best
collaborator.
By 2009, Netflix had fullymigrated its video encoding and
storage to AWS.
When you press play, your moviedidn't come from a Netflix
warehouse.
It streamed from Amazon Cloud.
(18:19):
That same year, Netflix flippedthe switch.
They launched Watch Now, afeature allowing subscribers to
stream movies through their webbrowsers.
The library was small, just athousand titles.
The quality was modest, standarddefinition, and it only worked
on Windows PC.
But it was a spark that wouldignite an entire industry.
(18:40):
Revolutions rarely begin withperfection, they begin with
possibilities.
Streaming wasn't just aninnovation, it was survival.
DVD shipping costs were eatinginto margins, postage was rising
every year.
Handling millions of physicaldisks meant warehouse labor and
loss.
Streaming flipped that equation.
No envelopes, no scratches, noinventory.
(19:02):
Once a movie was uploaded, itcould be watched an infinite
number of times.
It was scalability, a word thatdefined the 21st century.
When you stop shipping productsand start shipping data, the
ceiling disappears.
Netflix didn't just store datain the cloud, it learned to move
it efficiently.
They built their own contentdelivery network called Open
(19:25):
Connect, deploying Netflixservers inside major internet
service providers around theworld.
When you hit play, the streamdoesn't travel from Seattle to
Virginia.
It often comes from a nearbycity, maybe your neighborhood.
That's why your streaming rarelybuffers.
It's local, cached, optimized.
(19:45):
The internet may feel infinite,but speed is all about
proximity.
By partnering with AWS for cloudinfrastructure and building Open
Connect for distribution,Netflix created one of the most
reliable streaming services inthe world.
Once streaming worked, thequestion was what to stream.
Licensing deals with Hollywoodwas expensive.
(20:08):
Netflix realized they couldn'trely on other studios forever.
So they started producing theirown shows, the first big one
being House of Cards in 2013.
It wasn't just about content, itwas about control.
Owning the content meant Netflixowned the data, the audience,
and the brand.
It transformed from adistribution into a studio and
(20:29):
later into a globalentertainment powerhouse.
Streaming wasn't thedestination, it was the doorway.
When Netflix made thetransition, investors were
nervous.
DVD rentals brought steadyprofits.
Streaming was uncertain.
But Hastings had data, and datatold the story.
A single streaming customer costless than half as much to serve
(20:51):
as a DVD by mail subscriber.
Every hour streamed was an hoursaved on postage, packaging, and
returns.
By 2012, the numbers were clear.
Streaming brought in highermargins and global scalability.
The DVD model couldn't followthe company into the future.
Every breakthrough is also abreakup, saying goodbye to what
(21:12):
once worked.
By the early 2010s, streaminghas surpassed physical rentals.
By 2023, Netflix mailed itsfinal DVD, closing the chapter
that started it all.
The red envelopes gave away tothe red pixels, the Netflix end
lighting up the screens aroundthe world.
They stopped delivering discsand started delivering
(21:34):
experiences.
Netflix's decision to move fromDVD to streaming wasn't just
about convenience.
It was about anticipatingbehavior.
They saw people didn't wantmovies in the mail.
They wanted stories on demand.
Anytime, anywhere, any device.
That vision redefined how weconsume media, how networks
deliver it, and how technologyserves creativity.
(21:57):
And it wouldn't have beenpossible without one key
partnership, Amazon WebServices, whose cloud turned
Netflix stream into a livingstreaming reality.
The future isn't a new product,it's a new perspective.
So, to close it out, and by theway, I'm going to do a history
of more of a deep dive into thehistory of all these services,
(22:19):
Amazon Web Services, Netflix,all that, you know, in uh in
future Sunday episodes.
So don't you worry.
I only did a snippet of Netflix,of, you know, we didn't even get
in touch about their potentialmerger with Blockbuster back in
the day, but we will get into ituh at some point.
(22:40):
All right, from JCRLicklighter's Dream in 1962 to
Amazon S3 in 2006, to theinvisible networks that back up
your phone.
At night, the cloud hasfulfilled a promise.
Computing as a utility,accessible to all.
Initial price was staggering,$20for 50 megs.
Today, billions enjoy gigabytesfor free.
(23:02):
What began as a way to storefiles became the backbone of
communication, business, andcreativity.
But the real story of the cloudisn't in the servers, it's in
us, the people who trust,upload, share, and create within
it.
We built the cloud to hold ourdata, and in return, it holds
our digital lives.
So next time you drag a file tothe cloud, take a moment to
(23:23):
appreciate the invisibleinfrastructure carrying your
world.
From the garage innovators tothe global giants who turn a
dream into the digital sky.
I'm Professor Jrod and this hasbeen Technology Tap.
So next time, stay grounded,stay curious, and keep tapping
into technology.
(23:50):
This has been a presentation ofLittle Toucha Productions art by
Sabra, used by Joe Kim.
We're now part of the Pod MacNetwork.
You can follow me at TikTok atProfessor J Rod at J R O D, or
you can email me atprofessorjrod at J R O D at
Gmail.com.
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