A presentation give at the European H-Cloud Conference to motivate decentralisation as a mean to improve energy efficiency, privacy, and opportunity for monetisation for your digital footprint.
2. The Cloud or The Internet?
Cloud computing had made it easy to
provide a large class of “Internet Services”,
yet we should not confuse a speci
fi
c
architectural style with the service itself
This essential difference is important as the
value is provided by the Service not by the
underpinning architecture (i.e. the cloud).
Example:
Cloud Storage is just a way of implementing an “Internet
Storage Service”
3. Cloud Computing Challenges
The privacy abuses revealed by
Snowden have been heavily
covered by the press
What is not so much known, is
that today the vast majority of
servers powering clouds suffer
from MDS and are as a
consequence inherently insecure.
[Security and Privacy]
4. Cloud Computing Challenges
As a consequence of centralisation Cloud vendors
have the lion share on data monetisation
opportunities.
This leads to an extremely biased market in which a
few control too much
If individuals have full ownership and control over
their digital footprint they have higher chance to
monetise it — if desired.
[Monetisation]
Example:
Your browsing history, your electrical consumption, your
running data, etc., is (often) owned, controlled and
monetised by third parties.
5. Cloud Computing Challenges
Cloud computing poses major
energetic challenges not simply
because of data-center but more
importantly for the traf
fi
c it generates.
All data gets in and out of a remote
data center — that consumes energy
[Energy Consumption]
6. The Austerity Dilemma
Whilst there there a growing
community advocating data austerity,
the solution is not simply is being
conscious on our use of precious
resources — such energie — but we
need to realise that the current
architectures, infrastructures and
technologies where not designed for
addressing the data age
The solution relies combining innovation to improve the
ef
fi
ciency of data distribution technologies with the
sensibilisation of European on the value of parsimony
[Energy Consumption]
8. Back to Distributed Systems
Cloud architectures have introduced a major element
of centralisation and have promoted an ecosystem of
technologies that
fi
ts and supports this model
The only way to overcome the limitations posed by this
model is to innovate by providing distributed
internet services to power the Digital Society.
We can’t continue relying and promoting architectural
styles and technologies that make data travel around
half globe when the source and the interested party
are in close proximity. Neither we continue promoting
technologies that have inherently security and privacy
implications and far from optimal energy use
9. Technology Stack
We have established the
Edge Native Working
Group in Eclipse to incubate
technologies to address the
aforementioned problems
Two key projects in this
context are zenoh which
implements a data plane for
the edge and fogOS which
de
fi
nes the control and
management plane
[Open Infrastructure]
10. Going Forward, Going Distributed
The way for Europe to innovate
and disrupt the market is not to
try to compete with the GAFAM,
but to make them obsolete
For EU economic interest, digital
sovereignty and sustainability
we should Go Distributed