In today’s world, everybody is talking about the Cloud. If people talk about Cloud, they are talking in the most case about the location where data are processed and stored.
In the mean time, while the “common” people are adopting the concept of Cloud Computing, Fog Computing or Edge Computing is the new upcoming term. Fog Computing is a concept that seems to be driven by the IoT Movement. Fog Computing brings the power of data refinement to the sensors. For several reasons:
- There is a huge amount of data that could be processed before they are transmitted to the cloud
- Processing the data on the device / sensors gives you the capability to intercept and react in the right moment!
- It reduces the amount of data that has to be transmitted to the cloud and processed in the cloud.
- It limits also some security issues.
But is Fog Computing the final solution? It will implement a lot of new problems, that the cloud has solved. One of them is “How to have all my sensor updated with the most recent release and machine Learning algorithm”. This will bring us to the point, where we have to start to think about Cloud Computing as a delivery model rather than a location.
Cloud as a location, will never solve the data residency issues. And to be honest the current political movement stands not for openness, but more for protection of your data and business processes. In a time where the economic war country against country has restarted, data residency is becoming more important. But not only this is a major impact. The Cloud as a delivery model has a bright future. The change to a micro service based approach in cooperation with a containerized delivery model, will let software vendors deliver their solution in the same easy way as it is to deploy the same code to their Cloud.
But we need OpenSky Computing. Why OpenSky Computing? I will try to illustrate it. When I heard the first time about Cloud Computing, my first word association was “rain” but not only rain, storm and disaster came also a cross my mind. Having my data and processes somewhere in the Cloud (Cloud as a location) was and is still scary. But to make the things more complex, Fog Computing is coming. Fog… sorry in the Fog you get lost! Cloud, Rain, Storm, Fog, disaster, NO NO NO. We need clarity! We need an OpenSky, where we have light on our data, business logic and processes. But even more, if we want touch the stars, Clouds and Fog prevent us to see the sky.
I know, a great game with word associations, but think more about this. Cloud is a great delivery model and helps to reduce the cost of development and deployment. Fog / Edge Computing helps us to refine data at the moment when they are happening. I saw at the EnterJS (@enterjsconf) Conference JavaScript code executing a neural network in the browser (by @CarmenPopoviciu). And here is the point, not the training was done in the browser, only the trained network was executed in the browser. Now think the next step. We can train neural network on big machines and once they understand the domain, we can distribute the trained network to small devices….
… and all in my body is crying: If software is becoming such a huge impact on our life, we need clarity what is happening where! OpenSky Computing should solve this problem and give you back the power of choice. No matter what service you want to use, you should be capable to define the location where the service is execute, as you should be capable to define the data residency. And at your fingertip, you should be able to tell where are you data, processes and business logic.
Time to dream about stars!
guedebyte 