We’ve all heard the promises of Internet of Things.
A world in which everything is connected. Devices communicating with one another at almost the speed of light. Automated sequences taking care of all of the day’s minutia. Data being recorded and analyzed so quickly that we’re provided with what we need before we even realize we need it.
Sounds like a utopia to some, and a nightmare to others, but however you feel about Internet of Things, it’s coming.
The question is, how do we help it along? With such a massive amount of data and interactions spinning throughout the atmosphere, we’ll need a powerful infrastructure to ensure that it can all continue to spin.
Over at TechCrunch, Chris Stone suggests looking to the past to make way for the future:
Connecting to the cloud should be as effortless and accessible as connecting to a power grid — one point of access to a variety of sources of infrastructure and services. Imagine an ambient layer on top of cloud infrastructure players, provider-agnostic, that could give us just that. A layer with a single API standard (as copper wire is to electricity) that would allow companies to connect to the infrastructures below, without being locked into specific tools and services. A serverless world, where we won’t think about “provisioning,” “instances,” “containers” or “operating systems.”
This has been attempted, and failed, in the past. But that doesn’t mean that the theory isn’t sound.
A vendor-agnostic layer would benefit organizations by giving universal access to the cloud in order to create a more secure It infrastructure and make auto-scalability a reality. It would free companies from locking in to a specific cloud service vendor so that everyone on the cloud would have the same services, access, and flexibility. Companies could scale easily because they would be working with the same standard across vendors.
Stone mentions that a common API may be a fantasy, but adds that the benefits are undeniable. Whether or not we get there remains to be seen, but in a world where the Internet becomes an absolute necessity (if it isn’t already) it makes sense that everyone is provided the same opportunity to utilize it.
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