Journalist / Gitana
Data is knowledge and knowledge is power. The amount of data collected globally is growing at an exponential rate. “By the year 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. By then, our accumulated digital universe of data will grow from 4.4 zettabytes today to around 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes. ” [1] Whoever can host that knowledge and learn from it hold much power in our world.
Enter the cloud. The primary cloud computing services out there are the big three; Amazon Web Services (2006), Microsoft Azure (2010) and Google Cloud (2013). While AWS is leading the market in the data hosting arena, Azure and GCP are very close to pushing them behind.
The Internet Cloud
The term cloud computing was first introduced in 1996 in an internal document shared among executives of Compaq. Compaq knew that with the growth of the internet there would be a migration of services that need to be stored virtually or the “internet cloud”. The cloud is like a giant computer for anything from photos and e-commerce sites to Big data and machine learning algorithms. Currently, the cloud market is about $178 billion up from $32 billion from 2017 [2].
The big three cloud computing services are all centralized service providers. What centralized services do well are; having the capacity to afford large server centers that can provide infrastructure (servers), platform (Operating Systems) and software (Applications) as a service while maintaining overall energy costs.
While having a one-stop shop for enterprise digital solutions, centralized services are also vulnerable to attack, physically and virtually. The more centralized services are, the more exposed businesses and individuals that depend on that service become open to one point of failure.
As such, enterprises are adopting more decentralized strategies. One that is becoming popular is multi-cloud computing, using cloud services from multiple providers. According to Lauren Nelson, a Forrester Research analyst who tracks the cloud market, enterprises are choosing this strategy “to remain vendor-neutral to mitigate vendor lock-in” [3] with one provider. Multi-cloud computing also helps “increase application reliability, reduce costs, and leverage the best services that each cloud provider has to offer” [4].
Multi-cloud computing has led to a market that is creating the tools, such as microservices and containers, to interoperate between the different platforms. Cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP are making sure “to support the tools that developers value most — none of the platforms want to be the one provider that fails to support a popular third-party multi-cloud tool, as it could be a costly mistake” [5].
Decentralized Cloud Computing & Blockchain Technology
As enterprises are looking towards more decentralized solutions to their digital needs emerging technologies such as crypto assets and their underlying blockchain tech have risen to the challenge. One of the areas where decentralized cloud computing and blockchain tech are needed the most is in the AI and IoT markets.
While cloud computing has helped organizations grow by capturing data, Machine Learning AI algorithms have helped to understand that data better and turn it into intelligence. “Human- and machine-generated data is experiencing an overall 10x faster growth rate than traditional business data, and machine data are increasing even more rapidly at 50x the growth rate.” [6] What does this mean for the cloud computing industry? It means that there need to be services not only for human-generated data but for machine centered data as well. According to Sanjay Mahadi at Forbes Technology Council, “[n]ow is about the time that we should start yielding to machine intelligence by building and positioning our compute models that can recognize the needs of machines as a separate and necessary factor” [7].
This sentiment was echoed during a panel on AI & Blockchain tech in Shanghai, China last week [8]. There, pioneers in the AI industry described why blockchain is a necessary tool for their fields to grow. The companies represented on the panel were SingularityNET, Bottos, Cortex and Deepbrain Chain. The three significant challenges, the panelists all agreed, are facing the AI market today are; data centralization, cost of data and computing power services and the lack of a platform for open source AI algorithms to be distributed and shared.
Blockchain technology can address these needs with its distributed ledger technology. How? Imagine a platform where individuals and smaller enterprises can rent, buy and sell their storage and computing power while also being able to share data in a secure peer-to-peer network. That type of platform is what a blockchain powered cloud computing platform would look like.
At this moment, as Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum has stated, blockchain is still far from being able to take the place of cloud computing. This is because a decentralized platform is unable to scale in a way that can maintain a platform for the vast amount of space and computing power needed for individuals and even more so, for businesses. However, decentralized cloud computing is making its way to the forefront quicker than expected.
Recently, notable venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with Polychain Capital have just completed a $102 million raise for blockchain project Dfinity, a decentralized cloud computing platform [9]. Through a process called Threshold Relay, Dfinity founder Dominic Williams described how Dfinity will “create a blockchain computer that is fast, infinitely scalable, and could host software with fantastic security that can act as a decentralized cloud and an open public cloud computing source” [10]. Williams goes on to say that Dfinity would “enable the re-engineering of the internet so that many of the monopolistic internet services of today could be recreated as open source businesses where the service itself doesn’t belong to any company or individual but can update itself.” Dfinity is currently in its test net phase and has not gone live.
It is still too early to tell which blockchain company will rise to the data challenges of our future. However, it is fair to say blockchain tech is at the forefront of that challenge leading the evolution of decentralized computing services.
[3] Ibid 2.
[4] https://www.cbinsights.com/research/amazon-google-microsoft-multi-cloud-strategies/
[5] Ibid 4.
[8]https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6439392095588454400
[9] https://www.coindesk.com/102-million-a16z-polychain-back-blockchain-project-dfinitys-funding-round/
