In 1712 the first Newcomen steam engine chugged to life at a coal mine in Staffordshire - it’s coals sparking the industrial revolution and changing the world. The industrial revolution was fuelled by the demand for energy and the efficient conversion of that energy into products that could be consumed by the growing and sophisticated market that was developing. Central to the provision of energy was how it was supplied and where it came from – the aforementioned steam engine was located exactly where the energy was needed and even the fuel came from the coal mine on which it operated. The factories of the industrial revolution were similarly located near the coal mines and the configuration of the factories was laid out according to the ability to get the rotary power of the steam engine to individual components via a complicated system of belts and driveshafts.
It was only the advent of electricity and electric motors that allowed the sources of power to be moved further from the equipment, but even then it was difficult. Generators could not be located more than a mile and a half from their loads and the voltage variations meant that it different generators and cables were required for different types of equipment – until alternating current, higher voltages and transformers came along to save the day. As recently as the turn of the twentieth century Nikolai Tesla started building a mechanism to transmit electricity wirelessly because the idea of having power lines hundreds of miles long seemed ridiculous at the time.
The location of power generation and consumers shaped histories and landscapes. The UK was cris-crossed with a canal system and railways to transport coal to the cities and even today a massive industry exists to move coal, gas, electricity and oil across the globe. The industrialists have, since the industrial revolution, been very aware of their energy requirements and the need to stabilise the supply influences foreign policy and is a key driver behind power and wars – past, present and future. It is quaint to think that a factory owner in the 1800’s would be so concerned that his power had to be generated on his own premises and locate a factory accordingly. Likewise, any suggestion to Queen Victoria that the pesky French would control large portions of Britain’s energy needs would have resulted in the choice between a long stay in a room at the Tower or a one-way ticket to Australia.
Given that one shouldn’t take history lessons from a technology blogger, you may wonder what this has to do with cloud computing. I see a similarity to energy requirements and distribution of the industrial revolution to the computing requirements of the modern world. Like having a great hulking steam engine in your 18th century Manchester mill could be compared to a great hulking data centre in your London head office. We are still at the early stages of the computing era and it is natural to want your data centre close to your centre of operations where it is under your control and clearly yours – financed, owned, operated, maintained and fuelled by your own people.
1809 - “Run a cable to a generator in France? Pah! Those frogs cannot be trusted! Just now you will suggest that we build a tunnel to them!”
2009 - “Host my data on servers in the cloud? Never! We cannot let our data off site! The regulatory frameworks make it impossible!”
Whether it comes in the cloud form that we form that we are wrestling with today, or whether it looks completely different, the ubiquity of utility based computing resources is, like the supply or energy to a factory, inevitable. The control issues will be overcome, the regulatory frameworks (which may not be that good anyway) will change, the competition will increase and the choices available to the enterprise will be infinite. At the end of the day it will come down to the price of the computing commodity – just like it is cheaper to produce trainers in China or beef in Australia, it is definitely cheaper to produce computing cycles somewhere other than the data centre in your basement.
I visited a data centre in central London a couple of years ago – their biggest size limitation is not floor space or even bandwidth, it is the size of the generators and diesel tanks in the basement to provide backup power (mainly for cooling). There is no way that a data centre in London, even a specialised one, can compete with a data centre that has unlimited power and plenty of space. The worlds two biggest power plants are in China and Peru. Mozambique, one of the poorest nations in the world, has a huge underutilised hydro-electric scheme at Cahora Bassa – all you need is a few containers of servers and some bandwidth to build a really cheap utility based data centre. Political issues need to be addressed and in the cloud world that can be done quite simply – locate your systems across all three or three hundred high risk, backward, emerging market data centres and if one goes down you should still be okay.
This may sound like a lot of science fiction and some of it probably is. Like the UI designers latch on to the Minority Report user interface, other science fiction influences computing visionaries. Indeed the term ‘Cyberspace’, which is sadly falling into disuse, comes from Neuromancer, a William Gibsons classic which pretty much started the cyberpunk genre - a genre where computing and communication resources are as readily available as electricity. Neil Stephenson was also an early cyberpunk author and wrote Cryptonomicon – almost a reference guide for security and data location. Us mad people that have read these books see the clues being leaked by technology leaders – Burning Chrome is a collection of early nineties cyperpunk and Goggle’s browser is, coincidentally, similarly named. Ubique, latin for ‘everywhere’ (as in ubiquitous computing), was also a character in Philip K.D ick’s (the Minority Report author) ‘Ubik’ and interstingly the unused domain name ubique.com was registered in 1994 by IBM.
So, as market research indicates, there is a resistance to cloud computing – while there is an acknowledgement of the cost benefits there is a concern about control. Like the early industrialists modern businesses don’t want to see core business facilities moving off their premises. So us supporters and early adopters may be vilified by those that want to sit in their offices and gaze at the heavy metal churning away to meet the needs of their business. We, however, are starting to adopt the patterns that will change the computing world profoundly, where huge resources are available at the flick of a switch – one day we will look back at the corporate data centre as a quaint oddity from history.
Simon Munro @simonmunro