Clearing the fog: The future of cloud computing
There
are many visions for the future of computing, and by-and-large they all
involve some form of distributed storage and processing. Sure, our
computers, tablets, and smartphones will continue to evolve and become
more powerful, but so too will cloud services and the internet
infrastructure that connects it all.
Whether we're looking at connected headset displays, constantly-syncing smartphones, or present-anywhere virtual machines, the cloud is going to play a significant role in computing in the years ahead.
A decade ago, cloud services weren't a thing that we interacted with on a daily basis. "The cloud" wasn't even a term, though it did exist - its role was making data more efficient. Case in point: the BlackBerry Network Operations Center. The NOC managed traffic between device and server by streamlining and compressing data that was sent to devices on the BlackBerry network.
The NOC was necessary then, back when you were lucky if your phone was capable of 100Kbps downloads, and even luckier if your carrier ever came close to providing that. Today we live in a world of LTE that can hit 50 megabits down, or even 75 or 100. The speeds are absurd, rivaling what's available for most home wired connections.
Of course, that's if you have a good LTE connection, which not everybody does. 4G connectivity is spreading, but rural and poor areas will lag behind for the foreseeable future.
like HTML5 apps, it’s a future that’s always coming but never quite arriving, and for a similar reason: the web just isn’t good for everything, and will never be as good for everything.
Take Google’s Chrome OS for example. The Chromebook Pixel is probably the most beautiful thin client ever conceived. And one of the stupidest. It’s a powerful machine that costs as much as the Adobe suite, yet can’t run Photoshop. It has a retina display that won’t display Premiere or After Effects. It’s utterly dependent on the internet in an age when the internet is still utterly undependable.
There are, should be, and increasingly will be software and services that make sense to be cloud-based. Not just things like messaging or browsing, which are born of the web, but anything that benefits from collaboration or cooperation. Other than that, nope, sorry. Code it natively so I can access all the power and performance native enables.
There's only one consumer operating system today that qualifies as a "thin client": Chrome OS. Google's second operating system, Chrome OS is built on top of a Linux core but is designed primarily as a WebKit browser-based system. As such, the Chrome browser (based on WebKit), a media player for music, photos, and videos, and a file browser are the only apps that are installed on Chrome OS.
Shipping in both Chromebook laptops and Chromebox desktops, the hardware Chrome OS runs on is typically lightweight in both its physical and computational measures. With the majority of the processing happening in the web browser and in the Google cloud (Chrome OS ties in nicely with Google's serices), high-powered hardware isn't needed for the Chrome OS experience. Most Chromebooks are relatively cheap, with retail prices in the range of $200 to $400.
Even so, in early 2013 Google released the Chromebook Pixel, a high-end Chrome OS laptop with a super-high-resolution touch display, powerful Intel Core i5 processor, aluminum unibody shell, and a high-for-a-Chromebook $1299 pricetag. Much like Google's line of Android-powered Nexus devices, the Chromebook Pixel wasn't meant as a market-dominating move, but more as a demonstration to consumers and partners of what can be done with Chrome OS.
Rather than a thin client, what seems to be evolving is a client with a nice physique. Not emaciated, it’s a right-sized machine backed up by an amazing cloud.
Chrome OS is ahead of its time, and hopefully Google will someday meld its strengths with the native strengths of Android. Dropbox, having already bought Mailbox, may one day field their own cloud-based operating system. So might Facebook, who’s already got a bunch of apps and strong cloud infrastructure. And Amazon has server-sided browser in Silk, who knows what’s next?
The clients that run any or all of those wouldn’t be thin either, they’d just be remarkably fit, and that’s what we want from the future.
We've been saying it all along: the cloud is the future of computing. But it's not the be-all-end-all of computing. While there's no doubt that the cloud will be more and more involved in our daily computing needs, especially as mobile networks grow stronger, faster, and larger, it's not going to replace our devices as we know them.
Our laptops, smartphones, tablets, and whatever other new forms of personal computing hardware arise in the coming years will continue to become more powerful and more personal, and the cloud is only going to help in that. If it's serving up additional processing power when it's needed, having all of our content on tap at a moment's notice, or simply getting us our emails, the cloud will be there.
But the cloud is going to need better infrastructure if it's going to be with us in new and omnipresent ways. More servers with better redundancy, greater bandwidth, and broader connectivity will all play a part in expanding the reach of the cloud.
Whether we're looking at connected headset displays, constantly-syncing smartphones, or present-anywhere virtual machines, the cloud is going to play a significant role in computing in the years ahead.
A decade ago, cloud services weren't a thing that we interacted with on a daily basis. "The cloud" wasn't even a term, though it did exist - its role was making data more efficient. Case in point: the BlackBerry Network Operations Center. The NOC managed traffic between device and server by streamlining and compressing data that was sent to devices on the BlackBerry network.
The NOC was necessary then, back when you were lucky if your phone was capable of 100Kbps downloads, and even luckier if your carrier ever came close to providing that. Today we live in a world of LTE that can hit 50 megabits down, or even 75 or 100. The speeds are absurd, rivaling what's available for most home wired connections.
Of course, that's if you have a good LTE connection, which not everybody does. 4G connectivity is spreading, but rural and poor areas will lag behind for the foreseeable future.
like HTML5 apps, it’s a future that’s always coming but never quite arriving, and for a similar reason: the web just isn’t good for everything, and will never be as good for everything.
Take Google’s Chrome OS for example. The Chromebook Pixel is probably the most beautiful thin client ever conceived. And one of the stupidest. It’s a powerful machine that costs as much as the Adobe suite, yet can’t run Photoshop. It has a retina display that won’t display Premiere or After Effects. It’s utterly dependent on the internet in an age when the internet is still utterly undependable.
There are, should be, and increasingly will be software and services that make sense to be cloud-based. Not just things like messaging or browsing, which are born of the web, but anything that benefits from collaboration or cooperation. Other than that, nope, sorry. Code it natively so I can access all the power and performance native enables.
There's only one consumer operating system today that qualifies as a "thin client": Chrome OS. Google's second operating system, Chrome OS is built on top of a Linux core but is designed primarily as a WebKit browser-based system. As such, the Chrome browser (based on WebKit), a media player for music, photos, and videos, and a file browser are the only apps that are installed on Chrome OS.
Shipping in both Chromebook laptops and Chromebox desktops, the hardware Chrome OS runs on is typically lightweight in both its physical and computational measures. With the majority of the processing happening in the web browser and in the Google cloud (Chrome OS ties in nicely with Google's serices), high-powered hardware isn't needed for the Chrome OS experience. Most Chromebooks are relatively cheap, with retail prices in the range of $200 to $400.
Even so, in early 2013 Google released the Chromebook Pixel, a high-end Chrome OS laptop with a super-high-resolution touch display, powerful Intel Core i5 processor, aluminum unibody shell, and a high-for-a-Chromebook $1299 pricetag. Much like Google's line of Android-powered Nexus devices, the Chromebook Pixel wasn't meant as a market-dominating move, but more as a demonstration to consumers and partners of what can be done with Chrome OS.
Rather than a thin client, what seems to be evolving is a client with a nice physique. Not emaciated, it’s a right-sized machine backed up by an amazing cloud.
Chrome OS is ahead of its time, and hopefully Google will someday meld its strengths with the native strengths of Android. Dropbox, having already bought Mailbox, may one day field their own cloud-based operating system. So might Facebook, who’s already got a bunch of apps and strong cloud infrastructure. And Amazon has server-sided browser in Silk, who knows what’s next?
The clients that run any or all of those wouldn’t be thin either, they’d just be remarkably fit, and that’s what we want from the future.
We've been saying it all along: the cloud is the future of computing. But it's not the be-all-end-all of computing. While there's no doubt that the cloud will be more and more involved in our daily computing needs, especially as mobile networks grow stronger, faster, and larger, it's not going to replace our devices as we know them.
Our laptops, smartphones, tablets, and whatever other new forms of personal computing hardware arise in the coming years will continue to become more powerful and more personal, and the cloud is only going to help in that. If it's serving up additional processing power when it's needed, having all of our content on tap at a moment's notice, or simply getting us our emails, the cloud will be there.
But the cloud is going to need better infrastructure if it's going to be with us in new and omnipresent ways. More servers with better redundancy, greater bandwidth, and broader connectivity will all play a part in expanding the reach of the cloud.
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