Server side

The cloud is dead. Long live the cloud.

Back when I was a kid people used servers for the crunching of numbers. They used dumb terminals to tell the servers what to do. The servers were in a centralized location so they and their data could be better controlled.

Someone realized that the dumb terminals were getting very smart. Let's offload some of that number crunching to the not so dumb terminals and save ourselves some money. We won't need as big of servers and the electricity bill will drop.

Enter the PC (Mac, whatever). People run programs on their local system and are responsible for their own data. They pay their own electricity bill and only communicate to other computers on an as needed bases.

As things get smaller, they get dumber it seems. People want tiny devices that they can slip in their pocket. These devices cost five times as much and can only perform one fifth the math, but that is what people are willing to pay for so that is what they get. Some entrepreneurs speculate that they can offload the number crunching from the tiny devices to a server somewhere. People will be charged for this. Their data will reside somewhere else. People will be charged for this. Piracy will be all but impossible because every single byte will be tracked, identified, tagged and charged to their account.

Enter the cloud. Same as the old design, but because that model didn't work we will call it something else to prevent people who are still alive from that era from connecting the dots and being cynics about all the same problems this mechanism will have. Life expectancy of consumers is the number one cause of heart attacks in advertising executives.

Every time you click on something on a phone or connected device, you are causing hard drive in a data center to buzz and blink. Many of the functions on your device would not function without vast acreage of server farms backing you up. There are all kinds of tricks to lower the electricity usage of these juggernauts, but it all boils down to the cloud costs a fortune to run. It has gotten huge and is now over taking 2% of the energy produced in the U. S. according to the EPA. Something must be don.

All the tricks to make the cloud more energy efficient are great, but are doomed to failure because they are still consuming electricity. The real solution is to move the computation from the cloud to the devices. That makes charging for every click a bit more difficult. The cost savings may make it worth the while of the people who want to make all the money. You can't have it both ways. If you want control, you have to expend the resources to exorcise that control.

NPR just had a story on this subject. The last paragraph basically said that the cloud will be offloaded to the local devices. This means, not only will I be charged for my bandwidth, but I will be charged for the power and bandwidth that the cloud is using on my device.