The Age of Compute Services

In the past ten years we've seen the "Rise of the cloud".
Almost everyone moved their in house IT and infrastructure to Amazon/ Rackspace/ IBM/ Azure/ Google/ Whatever, got rid of their huge racks and pizzaboxes, and went on with their lives.
Enter the rise of Devops - A caste of people who control the know how of building, deploying and maintaining your servers. Mostly due to poor documentation of the host platform.
Then Docker came along - The ability to create containers for applications, which makes it even easier to run them - However, Docker comes with its own disadvantages (Irrelevant to this post.)

But recent years show a new trend - Where services like Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions are actually code containers (Rather than full blown OSs).

This changes the paradigm even further - No OS needed. Just code, deploy and go. Connect it to a file system (Amazon EFS)/ storage/ database/ whatever as a service, and you've got yourself a full working server with no OS, no deployment, all managed, secured, scaled and charged on demand.

This changes the economy of cloud services, as you actually pay for what you consume, and not for what you MIGHT consume (Even if you scale down during downtimes, it's never immediate)

It also changes the paradigm of programming - No need for security concerns (All managed), just a collection of volatile services.

In this new paradigm, cloud cyber, virtualization and devops businesses should take notice. Soon, their business might be completely irrelevant.

The untapped computing power

Now that cloud computing has taken over the web, it's time to think what would be the next step. Considering that the cloud providers are making money out of renting CPUs and storage. But there's already a lot of CPU power and storage connected to the web, and not being used most of the day.

This thought kind of takes me back to a '97 project called seti@home. That project used home PCs to parallel process radio signals from space. And though users didn't gain much from this project except for a thank you mail, times have changed since.

My wife, who has a day job, has a PC connected to the internet, operating all of the day. Imagine you can rent your computer for processing power or storage. Such network infrastructure already exists, and it would be pretty simple to install a client which receives jobs or lends storage for a cloud based network. As most search/ image processing/ big data analysis engines use map reduce and distributed storage nodes, such a network could provide a reliable, viable alternative to current cloud providers.

Been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. Who wants to join me and implement such a network?