Where’re Clouds Headed?

Indranil Gupta

Department of Computer Science

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Distributed Protocols Research Group: http://dprg.cs.uiuc.edu

I predict…

2Source: Wikimedia Commons

I predict that some of our predictions will be false

3Source: Wikimedia Commons

I predict…• That users will want more predictability (pun intended) from cloud services

• Faster! More consistent! More predictable!– NoSQL moving back towards transactions (CAP Theorem?)

• SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and SLOs (Service Level Objectives)– Real-time deadlines, budget constraints, data staleness,…– Vertical scaling and Horizontal scaling, Adaptively

• Security– Bread and butter: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability– Beyond: Privacy Preserving techniques

• Cloud is just another Thing– In the Internet of Things– Sadly, we cannot hide the cloud completely from users (we are aware of power utility companies, aren’t

we?). But we can make it less intrusive.

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Really 5 years from now…• Cloud Computing is a coming back full cycle of the Data Processing Industry (back in

the 1970s) – a multi-billion dollar industry– Next came the revolution of PCs (1980s)

• Computing eras go in cycles, and since history repeats…– Will workstations and laptops get really powerful? 1000s cores? (Used how?)

– Networked how? Clusters of beefy nodes? P2P?

– Will “Consolidate in” turn to “Consolidate up”?

• The movement towards scale up has already started– Single beefy machine has better performance/$ than COTS cluster

– HP’s “The Machine”, Infiniband/SDN, RDMA (DSM?), …

– Phones are becoming more powerful (and as big as pillows)

– Some watches cost $17,000

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