Cloud – What

Cloud is long gone my friends, long gone. Cloud computing is now just a tool for a ubiquitous computing society.

Allow me to clarify: simply, there’s absolutely no aspect of our contemporary society that is possible without constant, continuous, invasive and maybe pervasive involvement of computing. The so-called “pervasive computing” (Eva Nieuwdorp). I’m not going to discuss anything about the so-called pervasive dimension of ubiquitous computing, but I am going to leave the concept printed here. It fits well with one of the points I am going to make here.

Ubiquitous computing is the reality – so, not only the concept – where computing appears anytime and everywhere, anywhere. Let’s let this sink in for a moment.

There are many technical moving factors that make ubiquitous computing possible, for example:

Hardware miniaturization
Hardware affordability
Software affordability
UI and UX leaps
Communication infrastructure affordability
(so many more)

If we are to go into psychological moving factors, we would totally open-up a whole different world, so, we are not going to do that.

The reality is that we find ourselves in a compute-omnipresent society for a long time. There is nothing really new about all of this.

The TNT that actually placed the true ubiquitous in ubiquitous computing was the dawn of cloud computing. The ability to have computing as a service, any computing. The ability to “order random computing”. The ability to to LEGO with computing units on a global playground. Once this ability was available to the masses everything changed. Actually, the plain analogy with LEGO is not 100% right. It is like you always had the LEGO pieces, and now, by some magic, you can order magic part, place it inside your LEGO structure and it suddenly turns to reality. Magic and dangerous at the same time. Like black magic dust.

At the beginning…

There was, and maybe there still is, a lot of hype around cloud computing. You know, being able to rent and integrate the best of the best of a finished product in terms of computing is always going to be hyped-up.

At the beginning there were a lot of arguments about the “as-a-service” versus “ownership and independence” of computing “stuff”.

At the beginning there were a lot of arguments around the reliability of “the cloud”

At the beginning there were a lot of arguments around the security of it all.

At the beginning there were a lot of arguments about the cloudonomics of it all. Economies of scale, they said.

And now…

Now, the ownership problem was resolved. “People” asked, and the “people” have obtained the possibility of getting everything in and out of the “public cyberspace” as they please. We can run today an app in the cloud, and tomorrow in your datacenter, together with data, traffic, whatever.

Now, the reliability got to, I think, almost the best you can have. Proven in war.

Now, the security can no longer take place outside the cloud.

The twist

The last standing post is the cloudonomics. The turn here is that businesses moving to the cloud understood that the cost factor has to be balanced by the possibilities that you now have, post adoption. Optimizing the cost has to be balanced with getting more value for your buck.

If your business doesen’t find a way to benefit out of the fact that it can now be globally available, you have failed a bit

If your business doesen’t find a way to benefit out of the fact that it can now fairly easy make use of outstanding technology (AI/ML, BI, data archiving, data handling, etc) you have failed a bit more

If your business doesen’t find a way to benefit out of the fact that it can now stay available / grow in an elastic manner, you have failed a bit more.

We could go on forever.

It is about how “your business in the cloud” should incorporate computing in general, and contribute with some weight in developing the ubiquitous computing. That’s the sweet spot. Your cloud adoption is 100% successful when you get more ubiquitous.

The sharp tool

Cloud computing is to ubiquitous computing what a hammer is to a nail. This is not a hardware vs. software analogy, this is not a hardware vs. hardware analogy, this is not an infrastructure vs. service analogy. It is just a tool analogy.

If you know you are going to be hit by a hammer, you’d better be sharp at the other end.

P.S. building sharp tools is going to be the subject of the next topics.

Cheers.

Recently, I was about to tell a joke that started like this:

“Two guys walk into a bar, the first one says… “

Someone went all anti-climactic on the storyteller (me), stopping him (me), asking: how do you know which one is the first one?

He was not, at all, trained in mathematics. He does not know that, when order is not important, order can, and often must, be imposed.

I did not bother to explain this, I just rephrased:

“Two guys walk into a bar, one of them says… “

I am a good storyteller, after all.

This got me thinking:

A random first story

I have talked about how, back in 2012-2013, I had had implemented, from scratch, a mechanism for single execution of a mission critical operation. This was before blockchain was KBOOM. Blockchain existed, but I only knew a single and remote person that knew something about blockchain. Our team chosen to not use this relatively new technology at that point.

Last year, 2018, I was requested by my client to lead the rework of this system, but now, using blockchain. O yeah! We’ve got it done some months ago. This turned out to be the last side-project I took. For this year at least. I have my first child being born soon, and I need a break from these challenges. Anyway, I divert, back on track: single execution, blockchain, and a challenge accompanied by a frustration. We were a team of six people implementing this. Before starting, I wanted to make sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of what we do, and what blockchain is. Turns out, that while explaining bits of the blockchain, some people had troubles understanding the most basic concept: consensus and consensus algorithms. I went all haywire trying to explain concepts like: termination, integrity, agreement and fault tolerant consensus. I immediately remembered that when I was young, some very smart guy, forced me to read a paper called: „Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System” – by Leslie Lamport. I mandated that this shall be read prior to my explanation. Everything went smooth from there on.

Be lucky. It’s your responsibility now.

Part of my daily job is working with the cloud. Large scale, small scale, simple, complicated, doing cloud design, develop cloud solutions, teaching, consulting and whatnot. While doing all this for some time now, I realized that a certain generation of technical, and otherwise very well-trained people, mostly in the software development area, has a very big problem in working with distributed systems over the cloud.

I could not understand this for years. It just did not compute. Why was this happening?

Well, turns out, some people were just not fortunate enough to have a smart guy around while “growing up”, that was able to teach them the basics of distributed computing.

I have repeated the experiment from the first story 9 additional times. Each time the same result. It’s like a veil was unveiled for some people.

So, I dare you, I double dare you, If you feel you don’t quite grasp software developing solutions in a distributed environment, have a read on the same paper. It is a masterpiece from 1976-1977, I promise you.

Cloud is dead

Yes. Cloud is dead. We now have ubiquitous computing. And, to be honest, this is close to be dead soon enough. A non-distributed environment does not exist anymore. I am not sure it ever did.

Be good!