Everything As a Service(Concept)
The year is 2030, everything is a service. Fiber broadband has now reached over 60% of the world’s population, bandwidth is an outdated problem. Major developments on low latency protocols have completely changed the way people look at technology.
We now look at those old pieces of tech like the bulky paper weights they are. Our whole lives have been moved to the cloud, not like people used to speculate with bio implants or super smart contact lenses. Today I asked myself what led us here. Instantly, the legendary Chromebook.
Coming to think of it, I should have realised this sooner. Dropbox came along saying let’s put all your data in the cloud and we said well yeah that sounds good. But why did it take so long for us to say wait why don’t we put everything else in the cloud?
I remember back in 2020 when the first PAS(Processing as a service) came along. Researchers were crazy about it. They could rent out massive supercomputers and run their research in hours. Without having to wait in line for days for the university’s mainframes. Processing is cheap infrastructure was the only problem.
Some smarter companies saw this coming, at least I like to think so. Cloud9 (the online text editor) said you don’t need a computer to write code, only an internet connection. Meanwhile Nvidia grid(with server side GPUs) was trying hard to stay viable by targeting enterprise. All because we still had those outdated protocols, what was it called again? TCP I think.
Well this it’s just a bunch of old stuff now. When 2LP (Low Latency Protocol) became the norm for cloud applications, all other companies realised. With super low latency we can do everything in the cloud. User’s won’t even be able to notice the difference.
By then a 40% of all laptops for end consumers were Chromebooks. Google made the transition from CPUs(Central processing unit) to NPUs(Network processing unit). Our new machines stopped processing data and switched completely to performing new network based tasks, like network caching. Latency between the now called ‘client operating system’(COS) and the actual Os stored in the server became minimal and good enough to do basically anything. However, now with elastic scaling we could run even the most complex simulations for a couple of minutes, and then go back to Facebook without any worry for battery life or noise, because after all fans on laptops are way too 2019.
By 2024 you couldn’t really buy a old school laptop anymore, they were slow, noisy and heavy. Who could live without the convenience of our week-long batteries. In the end laptops back then were just a portable monitor and keyboard to our mainframes.
At this point I asked myself how people did not think of this before. All processing in the world is being handled by data centres in places which are naturally cold and where energy is cheap, due to close proximity to solar and nuclear plants. We are saving energy and increasing portability, not counting the fact that if my laptop breaks right now, I can keep working seamlessly on this article on my phone.
Oh yeah phones do you remember recharging them every night? Probably not because now that they are basically just another monitor with 95% of their internals being only layered batteries. Charging is a thing you do when you feel like it or when you go camping for a 3 day weekend(just in case).
Thinking back, now I remember why PAS(Processing as a service) didn’t become mainstream until so recently. Some people used to say something about that privacy thing. But I don’t see them carrying non-cloud devices these days. It is 2030 and I don’t think anyone really knows what privacy is anymore.
