Leveraging the computer power around you.
No that is not a typo – just a play on words to try to add some balance to the cloud mania sweeping the tech world.
The emergence of cloud computing has been a positive development overall, enabling small organizations in particular to build applications that can truly scale without major up front investment.
It is, however, worth remembering that, like all technologies, there will be times when it is a good fit for a particular task and times when other approaches may be better. In other words we need to think carefully about solution architectures and make sure we are not just following the latest technology fashion.
In particular there will be many instances when a user’s own machine may actually be the best place to do some work, rather than the ubiquitous cloud. When bandwidth is tight and servers in the cloud are busy, it will often be the case that a users PC is sitting relatively idle.
This is where ‘clod’ (a lump of earth or clay – i.e. down on the ground, not up in the clouds) computing comes in. Doing as much of the work as possible on the users local machine reduces the load on the servers, and also can reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent back and forth to the cloud.
The main problem with this approach today is the need for dedicated software on the users machines for many types of tasks because browsers have traditionally not been able to work on and save local files on a users machine for very good security reasons.
The good news is that web standards are evolving (slowly…) so that more and more browsers are able to support more and more local work, and support it securely which is key.
Similarly, while a phone may not have the processing power to quickly do the work you want, for example edit or compress a large video file, it is possible to leverage some of the available horsepower in the laptop sitting beside it, or even in other phones and tablets to help with the task.
Proprietary solutions and proof of concepts already exist for this type of local co-operative ‘clod’ computing.
In the future I think we will see certain types of applications taking advantage of these new developments, leveraging new standards or industry best practices.
We may possibly even witness the emergence of a whole new trend that we can then rush to follow – albeit, perhaps with a slightly more marketable name than ‘Clod Computing’…