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This Is the Cloud: Inside Microsoft’s Secret Stealth Data Centers "The cloud" isn't some nebulous thing existing just beyond your computer's consciousness. As Microsoft showed us, it's stacks of hard drives packed into shipping containers, parked in secret data centers all around the world. Physically real, but still beautiful. Microsoft's cloud capability isn't just interesting because Ballmer told us it was. It's the only serious hardware company that also has a serious cloud capability. (Google can't touch Microsoft's hardware, and Apple can't touch either in online services.) As for these servers, you should get the basic concept: Networked storage with hot-swappable drives. Take that idea, extend it to power and cooling, and multiply it by thousands of drives, and you get what Microsoft is deploying for its cloud services—be it Exchange Server or Bing or Office 2010. It's a shipping container that's a fully self-contained server system. And true to its modular design, it can also be one piece of a larger network of servers, that can be set up anywhere, in a hurry.