What is the cloud?

The scale of capital investment in the Amazon, Microsoft, and Google cloud physical computing infrastructure is monumental. Imagine the investment needed to build 200+ physical data centers with multiple redundant power and cooling systems, featuring state-of-the-art physical security. These centers are resilient in the face of a natural disaster. Even then, you are just scratching the surface.

These data centers require one of the largest interconnected networks on the planet to link them together. All of that infrastructure won't function without vast amounts of power and cooling, preferably from sustainable sources. For example, Azure has been carbon-neutral since 2012 and is committed to being carbon-negative by 2030. When people talk about hyper-scale cloud, they are talking about the planet-scale operations of these cloud service providers.

Ever wonder what it would be like to visit one of these data centers? For example, to access an Azure data...