Structure 2014 - Where is compute headed - Joyent
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Transcript of Structure 2014 - Where is compute headed - Joyent
WHERE IS COMPUTE HEADED IN THE NEAR FUTURE?
Bryan CantrillJoyent
Where is compute (physically) headed in the near future?
CTO
Bryan Cantrill
@bcantrill
History of computation as oscillation
• The history of computation is one of repeated oscillation between centralization and decentralization
• These oscillations are driven by economics:
–Economies-of-scale drive towards centralization
–Disruptive innovations drive towards decentralization
• These oscillations can also be seen as the tension between control and freedom — with each having economic advantages with respect to the other
Cloud computing as centralizing force
• By the 1960s, pundits foresaw an ultimate centralization: a compute utility that would be public and multi-tenant
• The vision was four decades too early: it took the internet + virtualization + commodity compute to yield cloud computing
• Public cloud computing is a centralizing force in that providers realize economies-of-scale — especially with respect to human capital and commodity hardware
• But is it also a decentralizing force?
Cloud computing as decentralizing force
• While the public cloud broadly is a centralizing force, inside the enterprise, cloud computing acts as a decentralizing force
• The cloud presents disruptive price/performance that allows for freedom from internal IT schedules and pricing — and from legacy enterprise hardware providers (e.g. “blades and SANs”)
• The net is reduced time-to-market for enterprise developers — which is especially important in emerging areas like mobile...
• ...but growth of the cloud in the enterprise has reduced level of control — and can compromise its economic advantage
A heterogenous future
• Enterprises want to retain the economics and freedom that the cloud represents, while reasserting the economics and control of a centralized IT organization
• This points to a heterogeneous future: much enterprise compute will remain on-premises — but the public cloud will remain critical, driving both innovation and economics
• The centralization/decentralization oscillation will remain, but the oscillations will not be in the technology itself, but rather in its deployment: public or on-premises
Whither compute?
• There are three key determinants for public v. on-premises:
–Economics: Rent vs. buy; OPEX vs. CAPEX
–Risk Management: Security/compliance — and also risk factors associated with operator-as-threat
–Latency: The speed of light is a constant!
• These are all factors, but economics dominates: “private cloud” efforts that do not deliver public cloud economics will fail!
The public/on-premises disconnect
• There are surprisingly few stacks that run both a multi-tenant public cloud and are available as a software product
• AWS doesn’t (appear to) believe in an on-premises cloud — and leading public clouds are not based on OpenStack
• For us at Joyent, both operating a public IaaS cloud and shipping its orchestration software (SmartDataCenter) has led to better engineering discipline and a superior artifact!
• Viz.: many of our architectural decisions came from the kiln of unspeakable pain that is operating a public service
From heterogenous to hybrid?
• To make the leap from a heterogenous cloud to a hybrid one, must have a common substrate that is run both on the public cloud and on-premises
• Not enough to have mere “API compatibility”; for workloads to truly straddle the cloud, gritty details like authentication/authorization/accounting matter a great deal
• This implies not just technical hurdles but organizational ones — and as a result, “true” hybrid cloud computing does not feel close at hand...
So where is compute headed?
• As it always has, economics will chart the course
• Public versus on-premises will not be one decision, but many — and many large enterprises will choose both
• The common substrate will be elastic infrastructure and commodity hardware; it is not a choice between cloud computing and legacy enterprise glop!
• We believe that there will be more unified providers that make available both infrastructure-as-a-service and the software to run infrastructure-as-a-service!