EDIT: I have been downvoted. This is not really an article, it is an advertisement for AWS. Perhaps people don't like me downplaying their commercial.
The future of the cloud is not AWS. Its not in Amazon's datacenter or some other company's data center. Its not even necessarily in a server.
The servers are going to mainly go away as we transition slowly from server-based networking to content-based networking.
That means that the fundamental protocols are completely unconcerned with what server they are running on or where.
The future is things like Named-Data Networking, Ethereum, distributed apps.
As a stepping stone we might see public clouds that allow you to deploy to ANY city anywhere in the world, enabled by distributed secure data storage and other technologies like Docker and OpenStack.
There is absolutely no reason everyone should run their applications on AWS.
We will also eventually move away from vendor-specific REST APIs to systems built on open semantic interface/data definitions.
I've been waiting for that to happen for the last 15 years, ever since Gnutella came out in 2000.
If you're going to claim that's the future, you ought to understand why distributed content-addressable P2P networks like Chord (created by YC's own Robert T. Morris), Kademlia, Alpine, and JavaSpaces all failed, and P2P sharing networks like Napster, Gnutella, Audiogalaxy, and Kazaa were unable to break out of their illegal-music-sharing niche. And then explain why it's different this time. If anything, the forces that made distributed hash tables unworkable in 2001 are stronger now, as Ethernet bandwidth, file size, and disk space have increased much faster than consumer Internet bandwidth.
I guess your prophesies seem groundless to some people here.
For example, I have not idea why future you are describing is going happen. There are many other alternatives.
What if future will be all about cloud computing provided by gargantuan sized companies? What if only a few hosting companies will remain and personal owning of computing device would be economically inefficient?
I might be misunderstanding you, but I don't think any extreme is a good thing simply because being limited to an extreme means having less choice, and that is a bad thing. There are advantages to centralism, there are advantages to distributed systems and there are advantages to doing the processing locally. The best state of affairs is having all these options available to you when deciding how to architect the best system for your requirements. If a mainframe type solution is the best, do that. If running it on your PC can solve the problem, then do that. If you need a combination then do that. Personally, I think that returning to the "mainframe does it all" concept is a huge step back in terms of freedom, and therefore in terms of potential.
The papers for CMU's cloudlets project cover some topological assets of code that runs centrally or is slaved to central logic, http://elijah.cs.cmu.edu
The next step is formalizing interactions for code that runs on the same node (central or edge), but originates from competitive businesses.
In uptime, security and manageability, nothing can touch the mainframe. If you build a mainframe out of thousands of CPUs and call it a "cloud" that's fine :-)
I can't protect my data from some random server it might run on. I happen to trust AWS with my data. AWS also scales vastly quicker than anything I could afford to do on my own.
There are a huge number of use cases where AWS / data center / servers are the best fit. That will remain true for the foreseeable future.
The magic homomorphic system doesn't exist, and I don't see any reason to believe it will exist on a time frame I care about. Short of that we can either deploy our own infrastructure (capital) or lease it from someone else (opex/"cloud"). The cost/benefit there is a business decision, and I see no reason to believe the latter option is truly "a single company."
tldr: AWS meets the security, privacy, and regulatory demands of the financial services industry.
There was an AWS:reInvent 2014 presentation about NASDAQ OMX. OMX is the holding company of NASDAQ that develops and grows the technology that runs stock exchanges in many countries.
OMX is using Redshift to build a cloud solution (FinQloud - Regulatory Records Retention) for their 20+ exchange customers (worldwide stock exchanges). To protect their data, they use HSMs (actually, a cluster of HSMs) to encrypt the data. NASDAQ OMX has a direct, leased connection to the AWS Data Centers. The data is stored on s3 in encrypted form and only decrypted at the time of Redshift building the reports by getting the decryption key from the HSM (over the leased connection). They have multiple alarms and monitoring around Redshift access in their offshore ops center (e.g. the postgres audit table).
True data privacy and protection is near impossible but Amazon makes it easier to achieve high-levels of data privacy and security.
The idea of encryption is that you can store it anywhere and it'd be secure.
If you can find an example of NASDAQ OMX using EC2 machines to host the data, maybe I'll believe you. But for now, your post is pretty bland hyperbole.
I'm sure the cloud is secure enough for a lot of businesses. But I think the links you have are reeking of "marketing", as opposed to a practical example.
Wow.. that is so similar to what I was thinking of. I knew I wasn't crazy. Well, I was pretty sure. I am very broke at the moment but I contributed a little to your Indiegogo.
I'm all for the decentralization things like Bitcoin can bring, but Ethereum is a scam (like so many others that are using the word "blockchain" to attract fools' money). That might be one of the reasons you are being downvoted.
With a cloud provider I at least have some confidence what I'm running on vs. some rando who's trying to skim personal info from one of your magical distributed nodes.
The future of the cloud is not AWS. Its not in Amazon's datacenter or some other company's data center. Its not even necessarily in a server.
The servers are going to mainly go away as we transition slowly from server-based networking to content-based networking.
That means that the fundamental protocols are completely unconcerned with what server they are running on or where.
The future is things like Named-Data Networking, Ethereum, distributed apps.
As a stepping stone we might see public clouds that allow you to deploy to ANY city anywhere in the world, enabled by distributed secure data storage and other technologies like Docker and OpenStack.
There is absolutely no reason everyone should run their applications on AWS.
We will also eventually move away from vendor-specific REST APIs to systems built on open semantic interface/data definitions.