Abstract
In its abstract, well-marketed form, “the cloud” is a black box, but the nature of its inner workings depends on the context. During my software engineering internship at Microsoft, the contents were a toolbox of Azure apps and a team of experienced developers managing live gaming services for customers around the world. In my STS research, the black box holds data centers and a material infrastructure that is negotiated by the interests of corporations and consumers, while impacting the environment and communities it reaches. Together, my projects explored both the technical and the infrastructural inner workings of the multidimensional cloud.
In my technical project, I worked as a software engineer intern at the Microsoft-owned gaming service provider PlayFab. When I arrived, the team needed to update an internal cloud application monitoring dashboard to maintain the tool’s functionality and comply with the ongoing migration of player data from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Azure. The dashboard was an important tool for the team’s internal operations, allowing engineers to quickly monitor and deploy apps in the cloud that support PlayFab’s live gaming managed services, which include leaderboards, matchmaking, multiplayer servers, and analytics. For my project, I updated the dashboard by rebuilding and automating its backend data ingestion features using Azure service components. I designed an Azure Function that periodically extracted data from PlayFab applications running in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and stored that data in an Azure storage blob, which would be rendered into a React site. The tool was integrated with the PlayFab development Azure subscription, helping to restore important real-time metrics and functionality to a resource used daily by PlayFab engineers.
In my STS research, I was inspired by my experience living near Data Center Alley in Ashburn, VA. Driving down the Dulles Technology Corridor, my family would lament at the seemingly endless new data center developments, but ultimately dismiss them as a “necessary evil,” something to tolerate if we wanted the benefits of the Internet. Then, seeing news articles about local protests and reports on environmental impacts of data centers, I was further drawn to the issue of the public’s relationship with the cloud, particularly in terms of their exposure to data centers. For my research project, I used news coverage to observe the current conflicts around data center developments, and considered their implications in a broader historical and material context characterized by existing research on the cloud. Through the lens of actor-network theory, interactions between data centers, cloud providers, and consumers shape the dynamics of the cloud industry through changes in infrastructural visibility. My research found that although tech corporations concealed the material reality of the cloud during its rise, recent data center controversies reflect an opening of the infrastructural black box, encouraging informed engagement in the evolution of the network technologies around us.
Working with both the technical and infrastructural allowed a perspective of the cloud as a multidimensional, heterogeneous phenomenon on various levels. Throughout these projects, the technology that I used and studied had undeniably social aspects in its infrastructure and its application. My experience working at the PlayFab team was based technically in the Azure cloud environment, but revolved around collaboration towards shared goals, business criteria, and customer needs, while my STS research uncovered cultural and political implications in the physical technology structures that comprise the cloud. It fostered a greater sense of awareness and appreciation for the multidisciplinary nature of the cloud, and it reinforced my sense of responsibility, both as an engineer and as a user, to consider the social dimension of technology. Black boxes are an opportunity to question existing systems, form a deeper understanding of their inner complexities, and ultimately engage with the world around us in a more meaningful way.
