Will Moores Law Kill Public Clouds?

Although the clock rates of CPUs aren't getting any faster - moore's law is still valid. The transistor count still doubles every two years. In few years we should expect CPUs with hundreds, if not thousands of processors and cores - for the same or even lower costs as comparable, today available hardware.

Even now you can run on "commodity" hardware like T2 64 operating system instances in parallel. The Vega 3 from azulsystems comes with 864 CPU already.

According to moore's law we should expect a tremendous computing power density in a small form factor (a 1U pizza box?). Having such power in place is it still viable to "oursource" your computing into 3rd party provider? In near future the management software of todays clouds could run on a single machine - your very private cloud.

One of the problems of such approach is the power consumption. The on-premise cloud installation is only interesting in case you are able to highly utilize your machine and provide (and pay) the necessary power.... 

Comments:

What you say has merit but as hardware increases so will GUI bloat. although i see a different possibility whereas in a few years we all have realitively dumb terminals that get plugged into the net and all our storage and processing is done on a cloud like setup. more like how mobile phones are done. as the overall speed of the net and our individual hookups get faster this becomes a real possibility

Posted by Andrew Gahan on September 30, 2009 at 11:03 PM CEST #

The important factor that you are missing is that we will always find new computations to use up all that available information, look at prime95, folding@home and SETI@home. This sort of cloud processing is always going to be used now that people are using it.

Don't forget that similar comments were made when we hit the 1Ghz mark, then again at 3Ghz and then again now.

Posted by shocklanced on October 01, 2009 at 07:54 AM CEST #

@Andrew,

you are right - something like Sun Rays is also possible. However you will have to deal with latency in that case as well. But even in that case: the Sun Rays are likely to be connected to a private cloud inside an enterprise and not a public cloud...

thanks!,

adam

Posted by Adam Bien on October 01, 2009 at 12:25 PM CEST #

@Shocklanced,

sure - there will be always demand for HPC in public clouds. But it isn't a mainstream. I think it is likely to find public cloud technology in private clouds inside enterprises in near future...

thanks,

adam

Posted by Adam Bien on October 01, 2009 at 12:27 PM CEST #

many "web services" are limited in the fact that the internet does not deal very well with real time requirements. This might change in future with net neutrality contracts and faster routing (ipv6...).

Its only a matter of time until we have average roundtrips in less than 50ms... and it seems like once again gaming will drive the market:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/emtech/24151/?a=f
(extreme example for cloud computing)

However, today its probably in many cases still easier to buy hardware and pay the power bill ;)

Posted by michael bien on October 01, 2009 at 06:00 PM CEST #

Adam, I think as an application platform it needs to exist. Application developers no longer need to create and maintain an environment for their applications to run in.

Things like google's "app engine" are really useful and if you don't trust that, setting up a vm on amazons EC2 is pretty simple. Its not purely about available cpu or memory.

In 15 years a gamers rig will probably have more processing power and memory than the entire of EC2 cloud today, logistically hosting your application from home will still face the same challenges it does today.

Not to mention the economic benefits of Cloud computing, you pay for the cycles you use, for start up's cheap is good :)

Posted by Justin Wyer on October 15, 2009 at 04:18 PM CEST #

Public clouds have one more advantage. They are reliable, if one node fails, others are working and users don't even know something went wrong. You don't have it if you use single machine.

Posted by Pawel Stawicki on October 28, 2009 at 06:37 PM CET #

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