Maybe its just me, but the hype about “the cloud” seems to just keep growing. I think that not since the concept of vaporware was created has the moisture content been so high in information technology circles, the relative humdity is making my brain all foggy.

It seems like everything just somehow gets fixed by putting it in the cloud. Security? No problem, our cloud does that. Data volume- The cloud is just HUGE man, HUGE. Dirty Data- Hey, clouds are made of WATER right? Trust us.

I goggled the word “Cloud” and discovered that Google places cloud computing over the boring water vapour hanging in the air type clouds. Although if you google “Types of Clouds” it does actually come up with a Wikipedia article talking about the different types of real clouds.

Then it struck me that there are probably different kinds of virtual clouds too, and we need to start naming those- so here goes a first run at it.

cirrus duplicatus

This cloud structure is particularly well suited to holding duplicate records. It consists of billions and billions of special data stores that implicitly avoid any sort of primary keys.

cirrocumulus delayious unconnectous

This cloud structure has a highly looped internal structure- data goes in, but will not attempt to come back out until it detects that your internet connection has gone down.

cirrus noworkus socialus

This cloud is used by all the big social networks- it enables lots of photo sharing, exchanging of comments, instant messaging, video viewing and has powerful anti-productivity filters in place at all times.

cirrus backupus disappontious

The backupus cloud promises complete data security- “In the cloud, everything is backed up ALL the time” – yet through a series of human errors (the cloud makes no mistakes- only its keepers) all data is uniquely stored on hard drives with failure modes that ensure no data will be recovered.

stratus brodcast allus privateous

This cloud has extremely powerful semantic filters that are able to detect the most embarrassing and sensitive data and then utilizes special high page rank domains to ensure your secrets are indexed immediately by all major search engines.

cirrius tellus momis

Just like “stratus brodcast allus privateous” only instead of using search engines it just emails the most compromising information directly to your mother.