Trying to Make Sense of ‘Cloud Symbolize’
So, I was working on this thing, trying to explain a setup I built. You know, the usual stuff nowadays, bits and pieces running somewhere out there… in the “cloud”. The problem started when I needed to actually draw it out. How do you show the cloud? And not just one cloud, but different parts of it?
My first instinct, like probably everyone’s, was to just draw that generic fluffy cloud symbol. You see it everywhere. Easy peasy. But then I looked at my diagram. It was just a bunch of fluffy clouds talking to each other. Didn’t really explain much, did it? What was storage? What was doing the actual computing? It all looked the same.
Alright, plan B. I went looking online. Checked out how the big guys – Amazon, Google, Microsoft – draw their stuff. They have icons for everything. Tons of them. Seriously, like hundreds. Some looked cool, very techy. But honestly? A lot of them didn’t make immediate sense unless you already knew what they were. And I didn’t want to use their specific brand icons anyway, felt like I was advertising for them, plus my setup used bits from different places.
So, back to the drawing board. Literally. I got out a notebook and started sketching.
- Maybe a box, like a server, for compute? Okay, simple enough.
- Storage? A cylinder, like a database symbol? Yeah, people kinda get that.
- Networking? Just lines connecting things? Seemed too basic. Maybe wavy lines? Or little lightning bolts? Felt a bit cheesy.
- What about things like serverless functions? Or containers? How do you draw that simply?
It got tricky fast. I realized I was trying to “symbolize” these really quite complex ideas with tiny pictures. It’s hard! You want it simple enough that people get it quick, but specific enough that it actually means something different from the other symbols. I spent a good afternoon just doodling shapes, crossing things out, trying combinations.
In the end, I didn’t come up with anything revolutionary. I basically settled on a super simple system.
- Squares for compute nodes or VMs.
- Cylinders for databases and block storage.
- Something that looked like a stack of papers for object storage (like S3).
- Simple arrows for basic network traffic.
- I added little labels anyway, because symbols alone weren’t quite cutting it.
It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t going to win any design awards. But you know what? When I showed it to the folks I needed to explain it to, they understood the flow. They could see which part was doing what, roughly. That was the goal. So this whole “cloud symbolize” thing, for me, ended up being less about finding the perfect universal icon, and more about finding a good enough way to communicate visually for a specific need. It’s about making the abstract just a little bit more concrete, even if it’s just with basic squares and cylinders.
