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The Beginning of The End of The Server … Towards a New Serverless Cloud

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We are stuck in a world of Von Neumann architectures. He created a model where we shared the CPU and memory. And so this was efficient when we ran small programs, and needed to multitask on computers. But now the Cloud is almost one infinitely large server, and why should we share our code within the same CPU and memory? And in our current Cloud, we pay as we go, and where we are billed per hour for large servers that create, that most of the time is just ticking away at a small fraction of their potential. The future is where we pay for each line of code and for the time that it runs, and where we can secure every line of code to its own computational space. This is the new digital world!

Preface

As a preface to this article, I’m rebuilding my academic infrastructure, again. I’ve moved from Windows .NET to ASP.NET, and now I’m moving everything into the Cloud. And, it is such a refreshing place to be, as I’m not constrained in anything I want to do. Well, there’s cost and performance that hold me back. If I have 100 students logging-in on a Monday morning at 9am, I’ve got to provision for these with 4 vCPUs and 32GB of memory, otherwise, it will crash. But when the students finish, I still to pay for the over-provisioned server.

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.