Cloud forward: From distributed to complete computing

摘要

Cloud computing matures and is increasingly being considered a baseline technology/enabler/utility [1], while being "extended" to address the requirements of emerging applications (e.g. mobility through fog computing), incorporate the advancements of other technologies (e.g. computations on the network through edge computing) or even become the enabler for service-orientation of different assets through advanced marketplaces [2]. The same applies for communications - enabling SDN/NFV 5G networking - and data-oriented technologies - enabling real-time big data analytics. Nonetheless, the advancements and the corresponding optimizations achieved in the aforementioned cases are (in their majority) "isolated" in each technological domain (i.e. computation, communications, data) and mainly utilize each other in a "black-box" way. While they all aim at serving the applications, the tools and frameworks in each domain exploit the information from the application space (i.e. following a top-down approach) to self-optimize the operation and provision of the corresponding underlying services without respecting the adaptations in or impact of the respective other domains. Representative examples are orchestration/choreography services in clouds, SDNs in networks and incremental queries in data management, which all regard the application as a behavioural model isolated within their domain - disrespecting thereby that e.g. changes on the network layer will affect the data availability and therefore expected locality. Moreover, the future application landscape is expected to be comprised of Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) as well as Factories of the Future (FoF) and mobile applications, thus posing even more requirements on computation, communication and data spaces: IoT and CPS are mainly characterised by complex dynamics and emerging behaviours in response to real-world events; FoF aim at digital automation incorporating unconventional technologies; while mobile applications provide media-rich interactive services. Are the highly-advanced but yet isolated computation, communication and data technologies able to address the requirements of the application plane in an efficient way?