What is going on in Cloud? What about AI, IoT and Smart Things? And how we f...ed all these things.

let’s first understand what is going on nowadays in a more technical perspective.

Everything is on Cloud, people communicate through internet, and if there will be any downtime of Cloud servers, then the whole world is even losing profits! I’m a Cloud enthusiast, and even my BSc and now my master is around Cloud/Fog/Edge Computing. But something is going very off…

We introduced Cloud a couple of years ago, and the main purpose was to actually find innovative ways to have distributed systems, and explore further the “smart” aspect into our lives. Smart Roads were even in research since 1991 (I found the paper and I was amazed of when this research had been done).

Now AI is the new trend, and while AI was introduced in the academic research for more than 15 years now, we somehow are “required” to use AI everywhere now in 2025/2026, either as users or as developers on every company.

You see that nowadays, AI can be used to many fields, from just to enjoy stuff (by generating images, videos and more) to actually help your productivity with your work.

Although AI seems to have produced a plethora of tools, not all the tools are trustworthy or valuable enough. And don’t get me wrong, you don’t need AI everywhere (even if your boss say so..). It’s just a trend, until we find the right path to use it properly!

But what is actually going on?

First of all let’s discuss about Internet, Cloud and bots.

Right now more than 50% of the internet usage is being made by bots. This is a HUGE number! Imagine all these stats you are looking at, when they say about millions or billions of users in any company numbers. These all are just a lie!

But why we have so many bots?

Let’s put everything on the right place…

Internet is the most important tool for everybody. Without internet nowadays, you cannot live, everything relies on it, from personal stuff up to bureaucracy, shopping, communication, even the whole government..

But… I mentioned many terms, including Cloud, bots, AI, IoT.. A lot of different things, but in the end all of these come into one place.. Businesses!

Well, that’s the problem. Capitalism is the problem! And let me explain why I have this opinion..

Internet started being used as something useful for people, being able to find the information you need, chat with your friends, upload something really useful for others.. But then capitalism came into this and created some internet sh#t.

Companies started investing a lot on internet including e-commerce and IoT (and now AI). Of course every move can take two directions, either good or bad. Internet started having a lot of e-commerce websites, people loved it, and then the bot usage started to be increased as well. On the other hand, having everything smart and to the edge brought IoT to be an Internet trend.

Bots can be used in many ways and with different purposes. Some people are building bots to find the best price of the product, or product availability. Some others to scam people in order to get personal information, money and more. Some other bots can be used to influence people to buy products (write fake reviews, or even create fake news!), Or even bots to find Pokémon cards and buy all of them 😛

On the other hand, as I mentioned before, companies embrace the usage of AI in everything, even though it does not make sense to everything. All of these moves create data, traffic usage, or even tools and websites that are not either sustainable, or giving any extra value.

And what now?

IoT and e-commerce created the need of huge data centers in order to have everything on Cloud. As a result, huge providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft invested (and still investing) a vast amount of billions in data centers. But do all these resources actually needed?

And that is the actual question we need to answer. If you consider the fact that in e-commerce websites you have at least 50% of your traffic being bots, that means 50% of your resource usage is wasted on Cloud for something that is not a human being, that is an additional resource for nothing!

Imagine then all this bot usage to different areas of internet, all of these “duplicate” AI tools that do exist, all of these tools and features that they don’t actually provide any quality of life rather than just serotonin levels to people only for some seconds..

Imagine all these smart things created that are not giving you any value to your daily life.. and they are there just for you to use them through your phone for no reason.. (still don’t understand why my fridge or air fryer needs WiFi… it does not make any sense!).

Working and doing my research around Cloud Sustainability, I realised that from the time that Internet speed was “unlimited”, data size was not a problem, and resources seemed to be unlimited as well, people and especially engineers stopped thinking about being performant. They stopped taking care of their code of whatever they were building. They didn’t care if a digital game is 4GB or 40GB. This of course created a “generation” of developers culture (and then this of course went to the users culture as well) that it was not based on the sustainability of the systems (and when I’m saying “sustainability”, I don’t mean about green or environmental friendly etc.. I’m talking about sustainability of a system, having performance with less resources).

This brought the result of a mindset, that we can build anything even trash, and have it on Cloud with not even thinking about size and resource usage..

*Have you checked on PlayStation (PSN) Store what is going on with all these “trash” games that they don’t have any value at all?

All of these things need Cloud, they need data centers, they need hard disks, network, Kubernetes, servers, energy, cooling! And they also produce CO2 emissions!

What can we do to make it better?

Ok for sure I don’t have the power to make things right for the whole world, and probably neither of you reading this article 🙂 ( if yes, please let me know, I am curious! 😛 )

But what we CAN do, is try to be conscious of our choices. I know this is hard with what is happening to our daily life, and it is not easy to realize when you need to make a “change” in order to achieve such a thing..

However below I have some thoughts and ideas that I’m trying to do to my daily life in order to help this thing personally..

Not everything needs to be on Cloud!

You don’t need everything on cloud come on! You can reduce your cloud usage, by limiting your data on cloud, your smart devices on cloud, your accounts to google (yeah there is no person with just one gmail or similar tool to another provider..)
You don’t NEED to be online 24/7 on social media!

Yeah ok I know we have a lot of influencers (probably not reading this article..) and it’s their work, and they need to upload always something. This creates too much data, too much information, too much trash! I know this is not “good” for the algorithms that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok has but I don’t mind telling it out loud! We don’t need TOO MUCH information!
Do you need to use 15 and 18 AI tools? I don’t think so!

I see a lot of people nowadays using a plethora of AI apps in order to make content, to actually make AI content (because nothing is authentic anymore..). Do you need so many Apps? Why you need so many apps? YOU have the potential and the creativity to THINK and be AUTHENTIC. By using too much of AI, we don’t only waste resources (and creating a power problem to the climate), we are also losing our minds, and stop being creative!
Do you need to browse too much to e-commerce platforms?
- Yeah I know, especially after Covid, it became a habit to browse on many different e-stores to see products etc and try to buy something online. This of course has a lot of different risks. By using more browsing on e-stores, more bots are being used in order to either influence your purchase, or check the availability of a product, or try to scam you. On the other hand, Ads is the other issue (that I haven’t mentioned it in this article, as I believe it’s a huge discussion..) that wastes a lot of resources on Cloud in order to make more sales and more and more and more.. And of course, don’t get me wrong.. Online shopping means deliveries.. And deliveries are also wasting resources (on cloud as well, and CO2 emissions.).
- So what to do in this case? Well I would say, go one step back! Try to go outside, go and check the vitrines, this will help you to also take another breath and oxygen! Do it simpler, and if you of course you are in need to make an online purchase, I’m not saying don’t do it! Just try to be conscious
If you’re an engineer/developer, come on guy/girl! Don’t use Cloud for sh#t projects 🙂

We (Engineers) all know what a sh#tty project is :). Try to make your experiments, work on your projects, but if you see that this does not bring any value, or wastes a lot of resources, or it has a potential to make it more sustainable by reducing libraries, data size or whatever, do it 😀

In general all the bullets above need to be considered with a bit of salt and based on your personal situation, this can be different. I’m not being hardcore here about those ideas, I just want to show you different perspectives of how we could potentially make our world better by doing such small things..

Of course there are bigger problems out there, and the aforementioned are in this case just a needle into a haystack. But still, it’s good to be aware and be logical of what is going on around us.

I hope that you liked this article! If you have any question or anything you might want to mention, feel free to contact me!

Talk to you soon! Till then bye!! 🙂