Johannesburg, 23 Sep 2020
Cloud is not the destination, as workloads and computing start moving back to the edge, according to Professor Herman Singh, CEO of Future Advisory and adjunct professor at the UCT Graduate School of Business.
Prof Singh, who is the key thought leader in a new series of business webinars presented by Nutanix, said during a webinar on the future of the cloud this week: “Cloud is not the end game. The evolution of cloud, or Cloud 2.0, will include a serverless model; instead of distributing workloads across multiple clouds, we are having to recreate clouds; and we will have peering clouds that are able to talk to each other. In future, we will see more specialised cloud for industries such as healthcare, banking and government. Gaming may go the route of clouds and cloudlets. Tooling of these hybrid environments still needs adequate solutions, however, since this space is not really as mature as we’d like it to be.”
Importantly, he said, edge computing was coming to the fore as a critical component of next-generation computing. “Rapid IOT increases and the tsunami of data this creates; a growth in complexity in multi-regional environments; and distributed ledger applications and crypto-currencies are driving us towards a distributed infrastructure. Networks, data and computing are moving back to the edge. This feels like déjà vu, a pendulum swing back to when we had mainframes and green screens. The centralised cloud environment has given us wonderful economies of scale, control and manageability, but we now see the pendulum swinging back to a decentralised world for low latency, avoidance of bandwidth use, and to keep up with the growth in devices at the edge.”
Prof Singh said in this emerging environment, applications would be moved down to the edge, with a fog layer processing some of that data and picking only the most critical data to send back up to a central point. “Fog is essential for the edge – it basically manages the processing and data flow and, in a very discerning way, takes some data and sends it up the line. This allows for better latency, much lower delays, and enables one hop only to the cloud. It makes it easier to define security, achieve mobility and gain real-time interaction.
“We will see millions of nodes and billions of devices at the edge, and a lot of the data at the edge is not worth moving to the cloud, so we are moving towards quick data at the edge and big data in the cloud,” he said.
Nutanix Connect is an engaging series that provides easy-to-consume information, presented by industry experts from around the globe, supported by customers, and tied together with interactive tools. Upcoming events in the Nutanix Connect webinar series will include:
- Automate, Integrate or Evaporate: How automation of the application stack became strategic – 30 September, register here.
- The 90% club: The collapse of high touch industries and their disrupted business models – 14 October, register here.
- Deciding what to do when you don’t know what to do: Learning agility in action – 29 October, register here.
Share