Next Generation Cloud

Companies have an increasing need to collect, store and process data. Now more than ever, information is power, but not only power. Collecting user or company data is at the core of most companies. Investing in data analytics grants companies great revenue, and is a must to stay at the front of the current market.

However, there is a lot of very costly infrastructure needed to accomplish all of this. If a company wishes to host their own server room, there are many factors to think about: the physical space where it will go, the people who will build it, the people who will maintain it, etc. Physical space seems like the easiest part, but it is not.

When building a server room, you need to take into account electricity, cooling, (backup) power supplies, cyber-security and many other things. Therefore, the planning, initial expenses and maintenance are usually too expensive to make this a worthy option.

Data centers were a great step forward in this sense. By providing the optimal environment, data centers allow companies to rent all the necessary infrastructure. This option has many setbacks as well though: companies still need people to manage their servers, hiring the facilities is extremely costly, and also companies need to hire large amounts of computers, most of which will usually be idle, so that they are available at busier times.

The next step forward was the advent of Cloud services. With cloud services, rather than renting the hardware, the buyer rents various kinds of computing services. Also, cloud services allow greater flexibility when renting computers, and so companies are paying for less idle computers ideally. Thus, they fix two of the main issues related to traditional data centres.

However, cloud services are far from perfect. While the services they offer are very convenient, the price you have to pay to buy them is very high. Companies spend large amounts of money in their cloud services, and this means that smaller businesses are not able to reach this market and compete with them. Cloud services are very elitist.

Cloud computing is facing even bigger issues: the energy consumption is incredibly high. Cloud computing facilities are essentially specialised data centers, and so their energy consumption is massive. Not only do they need to keep all the servers running, but the cooling and the infrastructure needed are not environmentally sustainable. With climate change aggressively affecting our planet, we need to look for a better solution.

The future is already here

Technology keeps evolving at an extraordinary rate. Many technologies that seemed impossible a few years ago are now a reality, and some of them are very close to us. The imminent 5G technology will likely revolutionise once again our everyday lives. With cloud services being over 10 years old, it is only natural that technology has evolved enough for its next step in this area.

And it has. Blockchain technology is proving to be secure and reliable, and with a very bright future in front of it. Facebook is jumping on the cryptocurrency market, with their own coin to monetise Whatsapp: Libra. (Don’t know what Blockchain is? Have a look at our Blockchain introductory post).

Furthermore, consider the following facts of our current technology:

• Internet connections of all devices are very fast
• There are billions of devices in the IoT, and most of this power is usually idle
• Blockchain technology provides a safe framework to utilise untrusted devices
• Cloud services are too expensive in all meanings of the word

All these facts are pointing at the next evolution in computing: distributed computing. In distributed computing all IoT devices, from data centers to smartphones, are used as computers that provide computing solutions. Thus, it extends cloud computing to the rest of computationally-capable devices, which are now not utilised.

Distributed computing solves all the issues we have mentioned in this post:

• Since no new data centers need to be created, it is the most environmentally friendly solution
• There will not be any idle computers — they will all be receiving tasks
• There are billions of devices ready to be used — the cost to use the distributed computing services will greatly decrease
• It is not centralised, but greatly distributed and guarded with mathematically proven cryptographic algorithms

In addition to all this, distributed computing introduces a novel concept in the network computing world, which ensures its good reception: any person providing their computer to the network will be rewarded for doing that, as most of the price paid by users to perform calculations will go to them.

Here at Cudo we have started working towards constructing this future. Starting with our working Cudo Miner platform, which after a couple of clicks gets you earning money in the form of cryptocurrency, we are very excited to announce that we will be releasing soon a distributed computing platform, extending the previous one, called Cudo Compute.

Stay tuned for the very exciting news that we will be releasing very soon. The future of computing is already here, and we are pioneering its implementation and mass-adoption in the real world.

Originally published at https://www.cudominer.com on June 20, 2019.