Moving Past the Cloud

This is an excellent talk by Brooklyn Zelenka from the fission project and is a good view into the future of distributed data and computing:

Some things from the talk that stood out:

  • by 2025, 75% of data will be processed outside the traditional data center or cloud
  • Sensor data explosion will kill the cloud – existing infrastructure will not be able to handle the volumes or the rates
  • permissions and encryption are easy to handle with a tree of data – you can give permissions at any point in the tree.
  • For syncing data, a set is a lot more efficient than a log or graph.
  • some things like authentication actually get simpler and the parties involved are more in control

It seems with the Simple IoT project, we are somewhat aligned with this vision as we are focusing on a distributed, edge centered architecture, handling permissions in a tree, etc. However, our data syncing is graph based, so there may be better ways to do this with sets. We also don’t have a good peer model yet – distributed operation is only upstream to larger instances, etc.

It seems clear that the future is not heavy, cloud-centered architectures that are dependent on one vendor, but rather flexible architectures where you can own the platform, and can organize it any way you like.