It's Time To Think Beyond Cloud Computing
by Hulda Echave A cutting-edge global cloud solutioFasten your harnesses, because the era of cloud computing’s giant data centers
is about to be rear-ended by the age of self-driving cars. Here’s the
problem: When a self-driving car has to make snap decisions, it needs
answers fast. Even slight delays in updating road and weather conditions
could mean longer travel times or dangerous errors. But those smart
vehicles of the near-future don’t quite have the huge computing power to
process the data necessary to avoid collisions, chat with nearby
vehicles about optimizing traffic flow, and find the best routes that
avoid gridlocked or washed-out roads. The logical source of that power
lies in the massive server farms where hundreds of thousands of
processors can churn out solutions. But that won’t work if the vehicles
have to wait the 100 milliseconds or so it usually takes for information
to travel each way to and from distant data centers. Cars, after all,
move fast.
That problem from the frontier of technology is why
many tech leaders foresee the need for a new “edge computing”
network—one that turns the logic of today’s cloud inside out. Today the
$247 billion cloud computing industry funnels everything through massive
centralized data centers
operated by giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. That’s been a
smart model for scaling up web search and social networks, as well as
streaming media to billions of users. But it’s not so smart for
latency-intolerant applications like autonomous cars or mobile mixed
reality.
“It’s a foregone conclusion that giant, centralized
server farms that take up 19 city blocks of power are just not going to
work everywhere,” says Zachary Smith, a double-bass player and Juilliard
School graduate who is the CEO and cofounder of a New York City startup
called Packet. Smith is among those who believe that the solution lies
in seeding the landscape with smaller server outposts—those edge
networks—that would widely distribute processing power in order to speed
its results to client devices, like those cars, that can’t tolerate
delay.
Packet’s scattered micro datacenters are
nothing like the sprawling facilities operated by Amazon and Google,
which can contain tens of thousands of servers and squat outside major
cities in suburbs, small towns, or rural areas, thanks to their huge
physical footprints and energy appetites. Packet’s centers often contain
just a few server racks—but the company promises customers in major
cities speedy access to raw computing power, with average delays of just
10 to 15 milliseconds (an improvement of roughly a factor of ten). That
kind of speed is on the “must have” lists of companies and developers
hoping to stream virtual reality and augmented reality experiences to
smartphones, for example. Such experiences rely upon a neurological
process—the vestibulo-ocular reflex—that coordinates eye and head
movements. It occurs within seven milliseconds, and if your device takes
10 times that long to hear back from a server, forget about suspension
of disbelief.
Immersive experiences are just the start of this
new kind of need for speed. Everywhere you look, our autonomously
driving, drone-clogged, robot-operated future needs to shave more
milliseconds off its network-roundtrip clock. For smart vehicles alone,
Toyota noted that the amount of data flowing between vehicles and cloud computing services is estimated to reach 10 exabytes per month by 2025.
Cloud
computing giants haven’t ignored the lag problem. In May, Microsoft
announced the testing of its new Azure IoT Edge service, intended to
push some cloud computing functions onto developers’ own devices. Barely
a month later, Amazon Web Services opened up general access to AWS
Greengrass software that similarly extends some cloud-style services to
devices running on local networks. Still, these services require
customers to operate hardware on their own. Customers who are used to
handing that whole business off to a cloud provider may view that as a
backwards step.
US telecom companies are also seeing their
build-out of new 5G networks—which should eventually support faster
mobile data speeds—as a chance to cut down on lag time. As the service
providers expand their networks of cell towers and base stations, they
could seize the opportunity to add server power to the new locations. In
July, AT&T announced plans to build a mobile edge computing network
based on 5G, with the goal of reaching “single-digit millisecond
latency.” Theoretically, data would only need to travel a few miles
between customers and the nearest cell tower or central office, instead
of hundreds of miles to reach a cloud data center.
“Our
network consists of over 5,000 central offices, over 65,000 cell towers,
and even several hundred thousand distribution points beyond that,
reaching into all the neighborhoods we serve,” says Andre Fuetsch, CTO
at AT&T. “All of a sudden, all those physical locations become
candidates for compute.”
AT&T claims it has a head start
on rival telecoms because of its “network virtualization initiative,”
which includes the software capability to automatically juggle workloads
and make good use of idle resources in the mobile network, according to
Fuetsch. It’s similar to how big data centers use virtualization to
spread out a customer’s data processing workload across multiple
computer servers.
Meanwhile, companies such as Packet might be
able to piggyback their own machines onto the new facilities, too. ”I
think we’re at this time where a huge amount of investment is going into
mobile networks over the next two to three years,” Packet’s Smith says.
“So it’s a good time to say ‘Why not tack on some compute?’” (Packet’s
own funding comes in part from the giant Japanese telecom and internet
conglomerate Softbank, which invested $9.4 million in 2016.) In July
2017, Packet announced its expansion to Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago,
Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle, along with new international locations
in Frankfurt, Toronto, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney.
Packet
is far from the only startup making claims on the edge. Austin-based
Vapor IO has already begun building its own micro data centers alongside
existing cell towers. In June, the startup announced its “Project
Volutus” initiative, which includes a partnership with Crown Castle, the
largest US provider of shared wireless infrastructure (and a Vapor IO
investor). That enables Vapor IO to take advantage of Crown Castle’s
existing network of 40,000 cell towers and 60,000 miles of fiber optic
lines in metropolitan areas. The startup has been developing automated
software to remotely operate and monitor micro data centers to ensure
that customers don’t experience interruptions in service if some
computer servers go down, says Cole Crawford, Vapor IO’s founder and
CEO.
Don’t look for the edge to shut down all
those data centers in Oregon, North Carolina, and other rural outposts:
Our era’s digital cathedrals are not vanishing anytime soon. Edge
computing’s vision of having “thousands of small, regional and
micro-regional data centers that are integrated into the last mile
networks” is actually a “natural extension of today’s centralized
cloud,” Crawford says. In fact, the cloud computing industry has
extended its tentacles toward the edge with content delivery networks
such as Akamai, Cloudflare, and Amazon CloudFront that already use “edge
locations” to speed up delivery of music and video streaming.
Nonetheless,
the remote computing industry stands on the cusp of a “back to the
future” moment, according to Peter Levine, general partner at the
venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In a 2016 video presentation,
Levine highlighted how the pre-2000 internet once relied upon a
decentralized network of PCs and client servers. Next, the centralized
network of the modern cloud computing industry really took off, starting
around 2005. Now, demand for edge computing is pushing development of
decentralized networks once again (even as the public cloud computing
industry’s growth is expected to peak at 18 percent this year, before
starting to taper off).
That kind of abstract shift is already
showing up, unlocking experiences that could only exist with help from
the edge. Hatch, a spinoff company from Angry Birds developer Rovio, has
begun rolling out a subscription game streaming service that allows
smartphone customers to instantly begin playing without waiting on
downloads. The service offers low-latency multiplayer and social gaming
features such as sharing gameplay via Twitch-style live-streaming. Hatch
has been cagey about the technology it developed to slash the number of
data-processing steps in streaming games, other than saying it
eliminates the need for video compression and can do mobile game
streaming at 60 frames per second. But when it came to figuring out how
to transmit and receive all that data without latency wrecking the
experience, Hatch teamed up with—guess who—Packet.
“We are one
of the first consumer-facing use cases for edge computing,” says Juhani
Honkala, founder and CEO of Hatch. “But I believe there will be other
use cases that can benefit from low latency, such as AR/VR, self-driving
cars, and robotics.”
Of course, most Hatch customers will not
know or care about how those micro datacenters allow them to instantly
play games with friends. The same blissful ignorance will likely
surround most people who stream augmented-reality experiences on their
smartphones while riding in self-driving cars 10 years from now. All of
us will gradually come to expect new computer-driven experiences to be
made available anywhere instantly—as if by magic. But in this case,
magic is just another name for putting the right computer in the right
place at the right time.
“There is so much more that people
can do,” says Packet’s Smith, “than stare at their smartphones and wait
for downloads to happen.” We want our computation now. And the edge is
the way we’ll get it.
Article Source is From : https://www.wired.com/story/its-time-to-think-beyond-cloud-computing/
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Created on Sep 14th 2017 02:43. Viewed 777 times.