When I first came across the EPIC 2015 video, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I watched it again when Wired’s Monkey Bites blog mentioned it recently. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out. Wikipedia also has links to an earlier version (EPIC 2014) and a Spanish subtitled edition.
In this documentary from the future, Google has merged with Amazon (Googlezon) and acquired TiVo, and Microsoft leverages its Friendster acquisition to build a social news service (Newsbotster). Its content is printed on Sony’s ePaper.
Traditional media disappears. Web hosting as we know it no longer exists, either. Instead, there’s the Google Grid: “a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see.”
In other words, the separation between infrastructure (our familiar “bandwidth + disk space = monthly fee” business model) and application/content is history.
What I found unsettling about the video is the endless number of new developments that the narrator matter-of-factly rattles off. Within minutes, we’ve gone from Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web to Googlezon, which “uses detailed knowledge of every user’s social network, demographics, consumption habits and interests to provide total customization of content and advertising.”.
On the other hand, real life is moving full speed ahead as well. It might not be too long before Cleversafe‘s dispersed infrastructure becomes the predominant platform for secure storage. And instead of overselling your network’s capacity, soon you may hardly need to offer any bandwidth allocation at all. The New York University-sponsored CoralCDN already promises high volume, high performance P2P data transfer:
Sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it. Using P2P indexing techniques, CoralCDN will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once. One of Coral’s key goals is to avoid ever creating hot spots in its infrastructure. It achieves this through an indexing abstraction called a distributed sloppy hash table, and it creates self-organizing clusters of nodes that fetch information from each other to avoid communicating with more distant or heavily-loaded servers.
And that’s a good thing, because given Infinera’s successful test of 100 Gbps Ethernet, Ars Technica says *much* faster broadband might be on the way, making your customers that much more capable of maxing out their 3000 GB/month data transfer limit.
So, how will your business evolve in the face of real and imagined changes in the web hosting landscape? Lance Crosby from SoftLayer has some great ideas; I’ll tell you about them tomorrow 
No related posts.
