Every year for the past several years Cisco ANZ CTO Kevin Bloch has produced a list of his top 10 ICT trends for the year “selected for their impact on the networking industry.”
This year he is predicting “the end of cloud as we know it.” That might seem a rash forecast given the still stellar growth of “cloud as we know it”: the likes of AWS, Azure et al. According to Synergy Research Group, in 2019 the global public cloud market grew 37 percent, AWS grew revenues 35 percent in a single quarter and Azure 64 percent.
Nevertheless “the end of cloud as we know it” — the dominance of a few players operating global networks of massive data centres providing cloud computing services — is a quite plausible scenario resulting from the nexus of several other of his top ten trends, specifically artificial intelligence, edge computing and 5G.
According to IDC By 2023, over 50 percent of new enterprise IT infrastructure deployed will be at the edge rather than in corporate data centres, up from less than 10 percent today; by 2024, and the number of apps at the edge will increase 800 percent.
Bloch says this growth will be driven by increasing volumes of data, AI, 5G, low-latency use-cases and real time streaming services. To that list could be added real-time applications.
Real-time applications require low-latency highly reliable communications to whatever cloud resources they use. 5G offers low latency and locating processing near the edge increase reliability. As the use of AI accelerates it will be increasing applied to gaining insights into, and controlling real-time processes.
5G: key to edge computing
5G like any important emerging technology has been overhyped. 2021, not 2020, will likely be the year 5G uptake starts to scale, Bloch says, noting that the 3GPP standards that will underpin all 5G New Radio technology are still not finalised, expected in early 2020.
However already we have seen moves by the industry to exploit 5G’s high bandwidth and low latency to play a key role in edge computing. Last October Telstra announced a partnership with CradlePoint, billed as “the global leader in cloud-delivered LTE and 5G ready wireless network edge solutions” to develop a “5G for Business” solution to be deployed at the customer edge and provide “the performance, security and management that businesses demand.”
In January, just days after the date stamp on Bloch’s predictions, Telstra along with América Móvil, KT Corp., Rogers, Verizon and Vodafone announced the creation of the 5G Future Forum “to accelerate the delivery of 5G and mobile-edge computing-enabled solutions around the world.”
They explained the move, saying: “5G and mobile-edge computing deliver lowest latency networks to mobile and connected devices while improving data throughput, reliability, power efficiency and security. This gives organisations worldwide the ability to deliver a wide range of transformative business and consumer use cases, like machine learning at the edge, autonomous industrial equipment, smart cars and cities, Internet of Things (IoT), augmented and virtual reality, and more.”
AI gets real (time)
Bloch says “many believe AI to be the most important technology of our lifetime. … In 2020, leading organisations will aim to scale AI in order to enhance and differentiate their business.”
Many applications in business – especially industrial require real-time or near real-time decision-making. AI certainly has the power to do this but will need to be deployed at the edge, not in a remote data centre.
Chetan Sharma Consulting, an organisation that claims to have been doing extensive work in the field on 5G and Edge Computing for the past five years has this to say about edge computing.
“We believe that we are at the cusp of a seismic paradigm shift wherein computing and communications will move from the core network and a centralised cloud architecture to the Edge. It won’t happen overnight, but it is inevitable.
“The reasons are manifold but the basic premise is that in order to serve the data, computing, and communications demand of objects, sensors, and people, resources, compute, and intelligence has to move to the edge to not only do it in the most cost-effective way but also to enable new use cases that just can’t be supported by the traditional cloud architecture.”
As usual though, hype likely precedes reality. A year ago Forbes reported: “AI has become the key driver for the adoption of edge computing.” That claim is almost certainly somewhat premature. Just this week ITPro Today claimed: “The prospect of performing AI at the edge is still mostly theoretical, but organisations are exploring potential edge computing benefits.”
As Bill Gates famously said: we overestimate change in two years and underestimate change in 10.
In 10 years’ time we should be seeing the early stages of 6G with even higher bandwidth than 5G, and AI will certainly have evolved by leaps and bounds. Any bets on when we will see “the end of cloud as we know it”?
