Ironically, you and I don't have millions of nodes at our disposal (criminals always get the good stuff). Now imagine if all this power was available to your application. With millions of available nodes botnets wield more collective processing power than the world's top 10 supercomputers. It looks as if the whole world is afire, every ember burning with computation. Notice how global, how plentiful, and how fast the flashes flicker. Each white flash is a bot waiting for its next command to send spam, execute a distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS) attack, or carry out some other nefarious deed. IRC is used as a command and control channel. ![]() What are we looking at here? This is F-Secure's time lapse video of computers all over the world, that have unknowingly become infected with botnet code (think pod people), making IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel joins. If you aren't Google, or a very few other companies, how can you possibly compete? For a glimmer of a possible direction that may not require a kingdom's worth of resources, please take a look at this short video: The cost for an infrastructure capable of supporting planet-scale applications could be in the 10 trillion dollar range (very roughly estimated at $100 million a data center times 10K). As the world becomes more and more global and more and more connected, handling the load may require building applications 4 or 5 orders of magnitude larger than any current system. ![]() Companies are scrambling to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in order to build even more datacenters. ![]() We aren't anywhere close to building applications at this scale, except for perhaps Google and a few others, and there's no way you and I can reproduce what they are doing. How can we possibly build planet scalable systems to handle this massive growth if building much smaller applications currently stresses architectural best practices past breaking? We can't. We will have 10 billion people, we will have trillions of things, and we will have a great multitude of social networks densely interconnecting all these people to people, things to things, and people to things. Tomorrow the numbers foreshadow a new Cambrian explosion of connectivity that will look as different as the image of a bare lifeless earth looks to us today. This may seem like a lot now, but consider we have no planet wide applications yet. Today 350 million users on Facebook is a lot of users and five million followers on Twitter is a lot of followers. The world is still fundamentally disconnected and for all our wisdom we are still in the earliest days of learning how to build truly large planet-scaling applications. Using the Ambient Cloud as an Application Runtime.The Amazing Collective Compute Power of the Ambient Cloud.The Economic Argument for the Ambient Cloud.Applications Become Black Boxes Using Markets to Scale and Control Costs.Richard Feynman on how the immense variety of the world arises from simple rules. ![]() Not everyone agrees, but I guess we'll see. All in all this is still my favorite post and I still think it's an accurate vision of a future.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |