Where is compute (physically) headed in the near future?

CTObryan@joyent.com

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!