By Jean-Paul Smets, Founder of Rapid.Space, a Hyper Open cloud provider based on open-source, open hardware and open service
Cloud computing has become one of the most essential cogs for running industry organizations and government institutions in the last decade. In fact, they have embraced it to the extent that it is fundamental to the way in which a modern economy functions. Cloud computing has enabled new businesses to be established very quickly, and allowed them to expand across the globe at an unprecedented pace.
As its influence continues to grow, there are a number of elements of cloud computing which could change in the future – some will be positive, while others could raise concerns in terms of ethics and security. Below are some of the key changes we can expect to see in cloud computing in the coming years.
Cloud infrastructure will shrink, open source will grow
At this moment in time, we are able to store an enormous amount of data without using a lot of storage space, and this trend will only continue to escalate. In 2018, Samsung released the first ever 30 TB solid state disk, and now anyone can have access to a seemingly unlimited amount of cloud storage. If one considers the total health data of a country such as France (about 10 petabytes), it can fit entirely on a single standard 19″ rack together with all the processing power needed for health research. This demonstrates how much easier and cheaper it is to build cloud infrastructure without the need for large data centers or substantial power to manage them.
Most of the key components of a cloud infrastructure are already available as open source software and open source hardware. The most prominent AI library, used by virtually any Big Tech, is an open source project called scikit-learn which was developed by government research institutes. Servers and networking at Facebook relies on open source hardware designed by the Open Compute Project (OCP).
Users will take control
But why do we outsource the cloud, when we can host the infrastructure ourselves in a small office room ? Most of the means are already available as open source at a fraction of the cost. When people will learn how to integrate and operate them by themselves, it will bring about a revolution in our attitude towards big tech companies.
You can compare the issue of outsourcing cloud services with water distribution in a big city; when it is outsourced, the company that has installed the water pipes can keep how they were installed and operated a secret. This means that whenever the service is poor, it becomes very difficult to change the entire system unless the information about how it is being operated is shared publicly. This is why some governments are now imposing, as part of public tenders, that water distributions companies share their operation data and processes to facilitate competition.
Now going back to the cloud, this translates to being stuck with application programming interfaces (APIs) which are mutually incompatible among providers and the inability to change to a different provider. Hopefully, in the future, a new generation of cloud providers will provide transparency on their operational processes, also known as “open service”. Through initiatives such as Gaia-X, users will make transparency mandatory in their tenders, The cloud service industry will then evolve into something more interoperable and reversible.
Automation of operation management will no longer be a secret of Big Tech
In 1995, Jeremy Rifkin, the economist and social theorist, posited that worldwide unemployment would become a huge problem as IT developments would eliminate millions of jobs in the manufacturing, service, and agricultural sectors. The drastic consequences which he referred to have not entirely come to fruition, but many companies are gradually moving towards automation. The way things currently work in the development of applications is that there is a distinct chain, whereby a developer creates the application, before other people pay, monitor and operate them. However, it is likely that people in this chain will be replaced by automation software in the future, because operating software does not require much social interaction – it is a deterministic process.
What Big Tech have achieved with cloud is to successfully automate the operation management of a wide range of about 200 software which are essentials to Entreprise IT: databases, web servers, application servers, etc. Big Tech can operate with a team of a dozens of engineers what would require thousands in a typical S&P 500 company. Even though open source software to automate cloud operation management has existed for 10 years (ex. SlapOS, OpenSVC), it is only until recently, with the release of Google’s Anthos, that people have realised their existence and their essential role for cloud.
Cloud, Edge and 5G will converge
With the exception of antennae, building a cloud infrastructure or a 5G telecom infrastructure relies on the same exact components: computers, switches and software. Thanks to virtual radio access network technology, 5G is nothing more than a software running on a cloud infrastructure. Modern computers are capable, without any custom acceleration hardware, to process a 5G radio signal of more than 6 Gbps, about 30 times what we usually experience with existing 4G networks.
Most cloud providers in the USA or China have been trying for a couple of years to integrate 5G radio access network (RAN) in their services, whereas some 5G providers are trying to become cloud providers. Microsoft purchased in 2020 a company called Metaswitch as part of the 5G strategy of Azure. Rakuten in Japan is trying to offer 5G as a cloud service to other telecom operators. Rapid.Space cloud also provides integrated 5G and edge for Industry 4.0.
Cloudless HTML5 will save costs and boost performance
The rapid development of web assembly and offline HTML5 means that some cloud services will become less meaningful in the future. JP Morgan has developed a reporting engine for financial data called “Perspective” which runs entirely inside the browser. This type of Web application does not rely on any cloud service. Yet, it does the kind of thing which would have required 10 years ago a powerful server hosted on the cloud. By running on the browser, it saves cloud infrastructure costs, scales to virtually any number of users and provides much faster graphical interaction
Cloudless will also help reduce dependency to traditional cloud providers and their mutually incompatible APIs. A significant portion of their services could already be replaced by simple Javascript programming running inside a Web browser. What JP Morgan achieved for reporting could be applied to productivity, business applications, data interoperability, etc.
Foreign surveillance of personal data could create a huge problem for the cloud
It is mandatory for networks in the telecom industry to include backdoors, which are required by the government for security purposes. However, this can sometimes lead to security problems, as was the case in 2009, when Huawei were accused of having unauthorized access to Vodafone’s fixed-line network in Italy, hidden in the software. This meant that there was possible third-party access to Vodafone customer’s personal computers.
Despite the potential security concerns which have surrounded Huawei, many carriers in Europe and around the world have fought to stop the company from being banned. To abandon Huawei during the deployment of 5G would actually not be incredibly expensive and would not cause much compatibility issues thanks to 3GPP standards. However, it would require to adopt alternatives to Nokia and Ericsson in an industry which is very reluctant to innovative technology from new players such as Amarisoft.
There are also many instances where a cloud company based abroad can potentially have access to information on the citizens of a specific country. For example, looking at the healthcare industry, Microsoft (based in the US) handles data on healthcare in France, and OVHcloud (based in France) handles data in the UK. On October 14, the French Supreme Court witnessed the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) submit its opinion that Microsoft should not host a public health data lake, as doing so was in violation of EU GDPR laws. Even though the Supreme court did not rule in suspending Microsoft immediately, it suggests that this trend in data sharing is not sustainable, and potentially damaging for the cloud. It is likely that we will see more federations of independent companies work together to distribute services worldwide, but who are managed independently in order to protect the privacy of each country’s data.
Will there be an ethical shift to accommodate the changes needed for the cloud?
An ethical awakening for the cloud is already happening in Europe at political levels with the Berlin Declaration. However, it does not translate yet into economics or sometimes has counterproductive result by giving even more power to Big Tech.
When it comes to consumer cloud services provided by Google, Facebook, etc. most individuals are not ready to abandon free services with poor privacy for paid services with better privacy. Government regulation is mandatory to change a situation described by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff. It is unlikely that any changes will come from the US considering the lobbying power of Big Tech.
The situation is different for enterprise cloud services. Lock-in strategies of current cloud providers are now better understood. Chief information officers now realise that they are paying about 10 times the price for something which could actually physically fit in a small corner of their building and could entirely run with open source software. They are also aware that their trade secrets are not well protected and that by using some cloud services, they could even risk jail as it happened for dozens of companies which sensitive information was disclosed to the government by their cloud provider.
Some enterprises are thus considering from now on how to reduce lock-in, cost and protect their privacy yet keep the economic benefits of cloud. This will create a new market for ethical cloud providers and, later, competition for conventional clouds which will overall improve ethics on the cloud market. But this will only happen if a lot of companies decide to reallocate part of their cloud budget to ethical cloud providers, just like they decided 20 years ago to reallocate part of their operating system budget to Linux at a time when Microsoft business practices were far from satisfactory.
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About the Author
Jean- Paul Smets, Founder of RapidSpace and initial author of ERP5, Jean-Paul is currently in charge of RapidSpace international development, investment relations and technology partnerships. Jean-Paul graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure with a PhD in computer science and from Ecole des Mines de Paris with a Master in Public Administration. He gained industrial experience in Apparel Industry, Oil industry, Non Profit Organizations and Lorraine Region Public Administration. He is an active member of Free Software associations and has played a key role in the Eurolinux campaign which succeeded in protecting innovation from software patents.
