On Monday, 10 July 2017 at 18:45:34 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
(Abscissa) wrote:
On 07/10/2017 02:16 PM, Joakim wrote:
I'm actually skeptical of cloud- I think mobile p2p will eat
most of the cloud-
I've been REALLY hoping p2p will
eat...cloud^H^H^H^H^Hcentralized internet services[1], but if I
were a betting man I'd bet heavily against it. For one thing,
for p2p to kill "cloud" we'd realistically need IPv6 to become
much more ubiquitous, and that just isn't happening.
I don't think it's necessary, but it would be nice to have.
And I think the #2 reason IPv6 isn't happening (behind plain
old inertia) is that it would *allow* p2p to overtake cloud.
I think you underestimate how well ipv6 has already done on
mobile:
https://blogs.akamai.com/2016/06/preparing-for-ipv6-only-mobile-networks-why-and-how.html
That post is now more than a year old, extrapolate accordingly.
Which brings me to the next reason I don't think p2p will kill
"cloud": All the big players with all the money and the power
all LOVE "cloud" because it allows them to hoard more power,
control and money, whereas p2p would completely destroy that
frontier for them.
Sure, many of the big tech players have built or are building
giant cloud businesses, so they're not going to be interested in
p2p, especially since there's no proven p2p business model. Look
at how BitTorrent Inc. floundered for more than a decade, before
finally sinking recently.
This just means someone new will have to come in and knock the
big boys off, maybe you. ;)
Also, replacing "cloud" with p2p would mean more reliance on
user's devices actually having decent storage and upload
bandwidth, but non-power-users (ie the vast majority of people,
if you don't live in hipster valley) are ambivalent towards
that, and it would raise the price of their devices, AND they
don't want to deal with running low on storage, or backing
things up, so they love "cloud" too.
A midrange smartphone or tablet these days comes with 2-3 GBs of
RAM, 32-64 GBs of flash storage, an ARM chip about as powerful as
a desktop chip from 3-5 years ago, and a 4G LTE chip that
provides dozens of Mbits/s both ways. Please tell me what
they're missing, you can buy all that for $200-300.
Both the engineer and the humanitarian in me both REALLY want
to see p2p eat "cloud", but I just don't see it realistically
happening.
All you have to think about is whether the hardware is capable
enough: we both know that it is. Then, the software will flow
downhill to where it can be executed most cheaply and reliably,
_once_ there's a p2p business model. It may take time for the
dumb engineers to figure this out, but someone finally will, and
when he strikes gold, the p2p gold rush will follow.
[1] The word "clould" bugs me to no end. It's the tech sector's
equivalent to "smurf" - stupid word is used to mean *anything*
internet-releated, even "internet" itself.
Heh, I was surprised recently to hear someone actually use the
term as a real "cloud," ie they were referring to both mobile
devices and servers in the data server, a true distributed cloud.
But yeah, most of the time it's just a new buzzword for ye olde
client-server computing.
