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I am old enough to be of the generation that grew up with vinyl. Unlike the romantics of today I remember the scratches, the arguments over borrowing my brother’s records, putting them on my worn and generally abused record player and the reality that after the first few plays, even with that brand new stylus, the quality degraded to that “warm” or, in reality, muffled sound that I remember. The revival we see today is a choice, largely based on the sentimental feelings that we tend to attach to music. Yes, I miss the artwork, the feel and smell, but do I miss the general faff? Not really. Even with a vinyl revival, we have moved light years away in terms of the volume of recordings available digitally today. There are very few who would want to go back to how it used to be. The choice of vinyl is from the world of irrationality not the rational.
The point is that technology doesn’t do sentimental. Compact Discs wiped the floor with vinyl records because they could hold more, were more robust and the sound was consistently good. Downloads have taken this further mainly driven not by sound quality but convenience of format, i.e. the iPod. We are driving down the all too familiar silicon integration cost convenience curve which is underpinned by Moore’s law; skip the box, skip the media and the album. I just want the song. In fact, I don’t have the patience to download, I’m going to stream it… and so on we go.
How do we get from this to thinking about the future of cloud? Well, for me the two are related. My first ever job was working for the American mixed signal chipmaker Analog Devices. Mixed signal simply means analog and digital signals; analog being the “real world” and digital being that of a computer. So their trade was and is in the conversion of the real world into the easier to manipulate, more robust and generally cheaper world of digital – and back again.
When I first started there, the division I worked in made an esoteric analog-digital converter which translated the movement of transducers found on airplanes, tanks, steel mills and missiles into digital so control systems could make the right decisions. There were two methods for making the same thing: the “Hybrid” and the “Monolithic”. At that time, 1987, the Hybrids ruled the day. In those days, the term “hybrid” was used to describe a component where we had to use two different types of silicon to get the thing to work. Hybrid literally means “different elements”. Conversely Monolithic means “(on) the same piece”. The key point was that the monolithic product was cheaper to make – a lot, lot cheaper. It didn’t require the hands of a surgeon to place components on ceramic substrates with gold interconnects. It relied instead on an automated semiconductor process. You know which production method eventually won out.
Let’s move the argument to the current state of cloud computing. Hybrid clouds are very much in vogue and characterize a status quo where the current internet-based cloud doesn’t meet the requirements of all the applications we have. So, we marry the public cloud with private cloud architectures, where we traditionally have foregone flexibility and elasticity for security and control.
As happened in the past, for those analog-digital semiconductors, the world of hybrid cloud is also just a transition, simply a stopping point, not a destination. We currently have pools of computing connected by a variety of communication methods, and we simply haven’t worked out the process to reach the “monolithic” stage. But we will. Current cloud computing is generally made of three things, elastic CPU, RAM and Disk. These can be reached via the internet or some fixed network. Just as semiconductors evolved architectures and designs so that they could become “monolithic”, the same will apply to cloud computing, but writ large across the globe.
The evolution of cloud from pools out on the internet will therefore evolve from today’s triple play to a “quad play” as the fourth element, the network, is integrated and automated for both private and public cloud types of environments – or to give network back its original name, Inter Process Communication, (tipping my hat here to a long line of luminaries who have made this point, from the father of Ethernet, Robert Metcalfe, to Professor John Day pioneering the next evolution of the internet).
Cloud is not a technology but a dynamic way of optimizing your consumption with the availability of resources – the same evolution that has taken us from vinyl to CD to download. The challenge is therefore to restore the original vision of the founding fathers of the core technology that underpins the digital and with it the global economy. The arrival at a global, monolithic “platform of computing” where the network is the computer isn’t a vision or choice. It’s simply the realization of a world set out and supported by a model which has remained faithfully predictable for the last 50 years.
Matthew Finnie is Group CTO and EVP of Cloud Services at Interoute.
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