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This is another signal of an interesting development on the hardware front. What used to be decoupled, with some companies offering hardware, and different comp

This is another signal of an interesting development on the hardware front. What used to be decoupled, with some companies offering hardware, and different companies buying hardware, is now coupled and hidden within these mega-companies (Google, Amazon, FB). Google is big enough to develop a trusted hardware solution for internal use only, it has no financial need to sell it. Worse, due to competitiveness in the cloud segment, it is dis-incentivized from selling the solution. Amazon Glacier is another one. It's an interesting long-term storage solution, whose hardware implementation is unavailable to the market, since AMZN can better explore it as a service under AWS. We are heading onto a more closed ecosystem than we are used to up until here. The cloud, which gave us the immense positive benefit of moving all capex to opex, is birthing this immense negative side effect of closing off hardware implementations in favour of exploring the added value in the form of services.

nom 10y ago
"We are heading onto a more closed ecosystem than we are used to up until here. " It wouldn't be more open even if they didn't spin their own hardware. You won't ever see it nor have access to it on a low level - it's 'the cloud'. The only thing it tells us is that they have reached a scale where custom hardware makes things cheaper, more reliable and more manageable for them.
- deelowe 10y ago
  Google joined open compute last year.
- sergiosgc 10y ago
  > It wouldn't be more open even if they didn't spin their own hardware. Of course. If the alternative is non-development, we are better off. However, my text states that the alternative is de-coupling: One company develops and markets the innovative hardware solution, other companies build services on top of that solution. This would be more open, it would present a more liquid market.
_yosefk 10y ago
It's not the cloud - it's the sad downside of the democratization of hardware design, as in fabs like TSMC and IP companies like ARM making it relatively cheap to make your own chips with competitive functionality in a wide range of areas. There's a lot of custom hardware outside the cloud, say in embedded electronics, that's just as closed as the stuff in server farms - closed specs and no way to program the thing, increasingly often no ability to run binaries unsigned by someone in a small set of vendors. Moreover, the GPUs and more so, DSPs and ISPs in your phone or PC are hidden from you in that they run code written by a very small number of people. You don't even have an idea how many small DSP cores are scattered throughout a desktop-class chip, let alone what they do or how to program them. Effectively it's for internal use of a very small number of hardware and software vendors, and the software is very much tied to the hardware. The reason computing hardware used to be open is that very few could make it and they only stood to gain from making it usable in as many applications as possible, or at least so they thought. Once (almost-)cloning hardware products became increasingly cheap with less and less vertically intergated hardware vendors (from fab to design), vertical integration moved to design+software because that's how you fend off competition today.
- sergiosgc 10y ago
  Very much true. I don't think the two reasons are exclusive; it is probably a factor mix. Lowered development costs, economies of scale, need for competitive edge in a market that slopes into commoditization.
- ust 10y ago
  It seems a bit counterintuitive that open hardware results in less choice, so I disagree. I think that hardware is getting more and more open, also drivers for it. With FPGAs it is (relatively) straightforward for one to create it's own crypto processor and integrate it in the system. Also PCBs are getting easier and cheaper to make. I hope that also there will be some open PCB designs that incorporate some kind of crypto chips and functionalities outside of CPUs, so everyone can start creating their own servers, if desired. Didn't also Facebook started some open server hardware initiative? I don't remember what happened with that... I do agree that the current status is not great, and that we could all benefit from more open hardware design. I think that it would also benefit large companies as well.
vgt 10y ago
It's a sign of changing times indeed, but for the consumer's benefit. It is absolutely in Google's best interests to externalize security for its customers as a differentiator of Google Cloud. The parent article itself links to the white paper that outlines how this is done for Google Cloud. I understand how one may consider this a "closed ecosystem" from one perspective. However, from a customer point of view any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments, whereas in the past this access has been reserved to the very select few that could afford it. When the barrier to entry is lowered and access is commoditized, customer wins. (work at Google cloud)
- pm90 10y ago
  > I understand how one may consider this a "closed ecosystem" from one perspective. However, from a customer point of view any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments, whereas in the past this access has been reserved to the very select few that could afford it. When the barrier to entry is lowered and access is commoditized, customer wins. I don't understand why the customer can't get these benefits AND the ecosystem be open as well.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    Pressure from governments to not supply consumers with hardware that is resistant to surveillance is one reason. AFAIK, the consumer systems that are most resistant to physical attack (and that lack spooky things like Intel's system management CPU) are game consoles. The hardening is a requirement for anti-piracy and anti-cheating, and in newer generations of consoles it's been quite successful. Recent iPhones are a distant second in terms of security architecture.
    - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
      I would agree with you if they cannot be updated via an internet connection.
    - hedora 10y ago
pjc50 10y ago
> immense positive benefit of moving all capex to opex Hmm. Is that really a benefit or Enron-ing yourself? I can see how it allows efficient ramp-up of small companies which can't afford a whole sysadmin for ops, but the big downside is that the return on capital goes to the megacompanies, to whom you are paying rent. I can sort of see why it's happened, because it's very hard to capture the added value of software by selling it. Especially in this area, the value of software is driven to zero. Whereas restructuring as a service and putting up barriers to entry brings back the margins for the developer. We almost need an update to Coase's Theory of the Firm to account for the disruptive effects of IP-heavy organisation.
- pm90 10y ago
  It reduces the resources needed to bootstrap your own company. Of course once it reaches a certain size, it makes it more cost effective to host your resources internally. There are also many organizations who do not want to deal with a whole division dedicated to maintaining a reliable, distributed, secure computer network for their employees and would be more willing to pay for the cloud rather than the extra people required to maintain the in-house solution.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    This is not really true. Not "once you reach a certain size", but once you move off the lowest-tier starter hardware, cloud quickly becomes much more expensive than owning hardware, and security solutions continue to depend on the individual administrators (most backups do too). Cloud's biggest benefit is really convenience, because you don't need to go to the datacenter and put in another hard drive yourself when you need more space. That's absolutely not worth the price premium most of the time. Large companies could hire hardware jockeys in-house for a fraction of the cost and smaller companies can't afford such conveniences.
    - skybrian 10y ago
      For "convenience" substitute "having the technical sophistication to manage it properly". How many companies know enough to hire and retain top-notch people to run a datacenter and keep upgrading it?
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
So basically what was assumed to be a linear trend is turning out to be a dialectic.
pdkl95 10y ago
More ground is lost in the cold[1] civil war[2] for control of the General Purpose Computer. I hope that everyone choosing to centralize computing power likes the future they are creating. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI#t=2824 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI#t=2824 (sec. 10 - http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt ) [2] http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
- pacala 10y ago
  What is different about centralized compute power compared with centralized energy production?
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    I never read the War On General purpose computing being about centralization as much as DRM restrictions on content and restricted developer support. In other words, it's not about deploying to the cloud versus deploying to a billion individual devices. It's about not deploying anywhere at all.
  - jstanley 10y ago
    Your centralised energy supplier can't monitor what you're doing with the energy, or exfiltrate your results, or even stop you from doing it.
    - illumin8 10y ago
      Yes they can. See smart meters. With analytics, they can determine every appliance in your house, and know exactly when and where you come and go at all hours of the day.
      - pdkl95 10y ago
        > smart meters > analytics The smart grid requires a lot of General Purpose Computers gather that data. However, this risk has already been considered. From the link in my previous [1] (sec 7): ... privacy [is defined as]: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. ... Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between you and the Smart Grid. ... If smart meter monitoring becomes commonplace, there are solutions that can be deployed. In case of a pedantic reading of that quote, I'm sure Dan Geer was merely listing examples. Further isolation from the grid should probably include some amount of local energy storage to smooth out the usage rates in addition to electrical isolation. In any case, as others have pointed out, the War isn't about centralization. The War is about the inability to turn a Turing complete system (the General Purpose Computer inside everything) into an appliance that doesn't run some programs. The universal nature of the computer puts a lot of power in the hands of the people, which scares some people and undermines many business models. Thus there is a desire (possibly indirect) to wage war on this new threat by limiting how many General Purpose Computers end up in the end user's control and hobbling the rest with spyware/drm. If everyone has dumb terminals and "appliances" that only run authorized software, the threat of people actually using the power inherent in every General Purpose Computer is neutralized. This war is ongoing right now, with small battles happening in every "appliance" or "service" that pretends a Turing complete computer is an appliance. The war is far from over, but we are losing a little bit more every time some piece of technology is centralized.
bsaul 10y ago
it's probably going to be just a cycle. Much like energy is very centralized with a lot of custom hardware ( think nuclear power plants) but tends to have decentralized alternatives ( solar panels ) for some advantages, you'll probably end up with the same cycle with computing power. Once a single affordable machine will be able to serve all your applications to all your customers with zero maintenance cost ( because innovation will keep going on), you'll probably switch away from the cloud. it may be in a long time though..
amelius 10y ago
I think we should limit companies to a maximum of N employees. This will ensure more modularity in the market. And more competition as well, because barriers are lower.
- gnu8 10y ago
  I like this idea. Maybe we should limit governments to a population of N citizens for the same reasons.
- cobbzilla 10y ago
  interesting idea, impossible to enforce. we'd end up with even more contractors, and mega-conglomerates of hundreds of companies with ~N employees each.
- true_religion 10y ago
  I read a sci-fi story with this premise. Companies could only be as large as X before starting to pay prohibitively large taxes in order to stay 'for profit entities' or become companies devoted to the public good. So you'd end up with large telecoms who were non-profits dedicated to improving the level of global interconnectivity, and lots and lots of tiny 2-10 man companies that did research or sales.
  - hello_asdf 10y ago
    Do you have a link to this? It sounds interesting, thanks.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
The fact that you're reading an article about a paper Google just published suggests it's not as closed as your doomsaying might suggest. Also the paper notes that Google is one of the largest contributors of bugs and CVEs to KVM, which is a security tide that will raise a lot of boats.
- idlewords 10y ago
  I don't think your use of "doomsaying" is fair, and detracts from a useful comment.
bitJericho 10y ago
This is how things have always been. It's the reason for our patent system, to incentivize companies to open up their proprietary tech.
zer0gravity 10y ago
> We are heading onto a more closed ecosystem than we are used to up until here. Not necessarily. Balancing forces always come up when this kind of things happen. The closing in of big players may give a big boost to open source hardware alternatives, which combined with the advent of 3d printing, may very well lead to the democratization of hardware...
jgalt212 10y ago
> gave us the immense positive benefit of moving all capex to opex Isn't it more correctly stated moving fixed costs to marginal costs? capex is mostly fixed, and opex is mostly variable, so you are not strictly incorrect.
stepanhruda 10y ago
http://opencompute.org http://opencompute.org proves the exact opposite
zengid 10y ago
Looking at what's going on in Shenzhen[1] in regards to hardware hacking, I'm not worried. [1] https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY
eva1984 10y ago
Thinking from another perspective, are those hardware just hardware? Not really, they are solutions, with tons of software supporting them. There is no point selling individual pieces, and they will not work out of box.
donavanm 10y ago
Is it really any different in practice? TPM is installed in basically every computer used in basically none. Even though its been a uniquitous "standard" for two decades its effectively impossible to correctly do attestation. Similar arguments could be made for UFI and similar. Just because some can write code for it only a handful of major suppliers actually do. Are those any more accessible than this?
taeric 10y ago
I think you would have a hard time showing this is any less closed than earlier days. For good and bad. IBM used to be at your door to replace hardware you didn't know was broken yet, and couldn't have fixed if you had known.

nom 10y ago

"We are heading onto a more closed ecosystem than we are used to up until here. " It wouldn't be more open even if they didn't spin their own hardware. You won't ever see it nor have access to it on a low level - it's 'the cloud'. The only thing it tells us is that they have reached a scale where custom hardware makes things cheaper, more reliable and more manageable for them.

deelowe 10y ago
Google joined open compute last year.
sergiosgc 10y ago
> It wouldn't be more open even if they didn't spin their own hardware. Of course. If the alternative is non-development, we are better off. However, my text states that the alternative is de-coupling: One company develops and markets the innovative hardware solution, other companies build services on top of that solution. This would be more open, it would present a more liquid market.

_yosefk 10y ago

It's not the cloud - it's the sad downside of the democratization of hardware design, as in fabs like TSMC and IP companies like ARM making it relatively cheap to make your own chips with competitive functionality in a wide range of areas. There's a lot of custom hardware outside the cloud, say in embedded electronics, that's just as closed as the stuff in server farms - closed specs and no way to program the thing, increasingly often no ability to run binaries unsigned by someone in a small set of vendors. Moreover, the GPUs and more so, DSPs and ISPs in your phone or PC are hidden from you in that they run code written by a very small number of people. You don't even have an idea how many small DSP cores are scattered throughout a desktop-class chip, let alone what they do or how to program them. Effectively it's for internal use of a very small number of hardware and software vendors, and the software is very much tied to the hardware. The reason computing hardware used to be open is that very few could make it and they only stood to gain from making it usable in as many applications as possible, or at least so they thought. Once (almost-)cloning hardware products became increasingly cheap with less and less vertically intergated hardware vendors (from fab to design), vertical integration moved to design+software because that's how you fend off competition today.

sergiosgc 10y ago
Very much true. I don't think the two reasons are exclusive; it is probably a factor mix. Lowered development costs, economies of scale, need for competitive edge in a market that slopes into commoditization.
ust 10y ago
It seems a bit counterintuitive that open hardware results in less choice, so I disagree. I think that hardware is getting more and more open, also drivers for it. With FPGAs it is (relatively) straightforward for one to create it's own crypto processor and integrate it in the system. Also PCBs are getting easier and cheaper to make. I hope that also there will be some open PCB designs that incorporate some kind of crypto chips and functionalities outside of CPUs, so everyone can start creating their own servers, if desired. Didn't also Facebook started some open server hardware initiative? I don't remember what happened with that... I do agree that the current status is not great, and that we could all benefit from more open hardware design. I think that it would also benefit large companies as well.

vgt 10y ago

It's a sign of changing times indeed, but for the consumer's benefit. It is absolutely in Google's best interests to externalize security for its customers as a differentiator of Google Cloud. The parent article itself links to the white paper that outlines how this is done for Google Cloud. I understand how one may consider this a "closed ecosystem" from one perspective. However, from a customer point of view any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments, whereas in the past this access has been reserved to the very select few that could afford it. When the barrier to entry is lowered and access is commoditized, customer wins. (work at Google cloud)

pm90 10y ago
> I understand how one may consider this a "closed ecosystem" from one perspective. However, from a customer point of view any startup or mom-and-pop can leverage these very complex and expensive world-class security developments, whereas in the past this access has been reserved to the very select few that could afford it. When the barrier to entry is lowered and access is commoditized, customer wins. I don't understand why the customer can't get these benefits AND the ecosystem be open as well.
- kabdib 10y ago
  Pressure from governments to not supply consumers with hardware that is resistant to surveillance is one reason. AFAIK, the consumer systems that are most resistant to physical attack (and that lack spooky things like Intel's system management CPU) are game consoles. The hardening is a requirement for anti-piracy and anti-cheating, and in newer generations of consoles it's been quite successful. Recent iPhones are a distant second in terms of security architecture.
  - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
    I would agree with you if they cannot be updated via an internet connection.
  - hedora 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

> immense positive benefit of moving all capex to opex Hmm. Is that really a benefit or Enron-ing yourself? I can see how it allows efficient ramp-up of small companies which can't afford a whole sysadmin for ops, but the big downside is that the return on capital goes to the megacompanies, to whom you are paying rent. I can sort of see why it's happened, because it's very hard to capture the added value of software by selling it. Especially in this area, the value of software is driven to zero. Whereas restructuring as a service and putting up barriers to entry brings back the margins for the developer. We almost need an update to Coase's Theory of the Firm to account for the disruptive effects of IP-heavy organisation.

pm90 10y ago
It reduces the resources needed to bootstrap your own company. Of course once it reaches a certain size, it makes it more cost effective to host your resources internally. There are also many organizations who do not want to deal with a whole division dedicated to maintaining a reliable, distributed, secure computer network for their employees and would be more willing to pay for the cloud rather than the extra people required to maintain the in-house solution.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  This is not really true. Not "once you reach a certain size", but once you move off the lowest-tier starter hardware, cloud quickly becomes much more expensive than owning hardware, and security solutions continue to depend on the individual administrators (most backups do too). Cloud's biggest benefit is really convenience, because you don't need to go to the datacenter and put in another hard drive yourself when you need more space. That's absolutely not worth the price premium most of the time. Large companies could hire hardware jockeys in-house for a fraction of the cost and smaller companies can't afford such conveniences.
  - skybrian 10y ago
    For "convenience" substitute "having the technical sophistication to manage it properly". How many companies know enough to hire and retain top-notch people to run a datacenter and keep upgrading it?

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

So basically what was assumed to be a linear trend is turning out to be a dialectic.

pdkl95 10y ago

More ground is lost in the cold[1] civil war[2] for control of the General Purpose Computer. I hope that everyone choosing to centralize computing power likes the future they are creating. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI#t=2824 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI#t=2824 (sec. 10 - http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt ) [2] http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

pacala 10y ago
What is different about centralized compute power compared with centralized energy production?
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  I never read the War On General purpose computing being about centralization as much as DRM restrictions on content and restricted developer support. In other words, it's not about deploying to the cloud versus deploying to a billion individual devices. It's about not deploying anywhere at all.
- jstanley 10y ago
  Your centralised energy supplier can't monitor what you're doing with the energy, or exfiltrate your results, or even stop you from doing it.
  - illumin8 10y ago
    Yes they can. See smart meters. With analytics, they can determine every appliance in your house, and know exactly when and where you come and go at all hours of the day.
    - pdkl95 10y ago
      > smart meters > analytics The smart grid requires a lot of General Purpose Computers gather that data. However, this risk has already been considered. From the link in my previous [1] (sec 7): ... privacy [is defined as]: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. ... Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between you and the Smart Grid. ... If smart meter monitoring becomes commonplace, there are solutions that can be deployed. In case of a pedantic reading of that quote, I'm sure Dan Geer was merely listing examples. Further isolation from the grid should probably include some amount of local energy storage to smooth out the usage rates in addition to electrical isolation. In any case, as others have pointed out, the War isn't about centralization. The War is about the inability to turn a Turing complete system (the General Purpose Computer inside everything) into an appliance that doesn't run some programs. The universal nature of the computer puts a lot of power in the hands of the people, which scares some people and undermines many business models. Thus there is a desire (possibly indirect) to wage war on this new threat by limiting how many General Purpose Computers end up in the end user's control and hobbling the rest with spyware/drm. If everyone has dumb terminals and "appliances" that only run authorized software, the threat of people actually using the power inherent in every General Purpose Computer is neutralized. This war is ongoing right now, with small battles happening in every "appliance" or "service" that pretends a Turing complete computer is an appliance. The war is far from over, but we are losing a little bit more every time some piece of technology is centralized.

bsaul 10y ago

it's probably going to be just a cycle. Much like energy is very centralized with a lot of custom hardware ( think nuclear power plants) but tends to have decentralized alternatives ( solar panels ) for some advantages, you'll probably end up with the same cycle with computing power. Once a single affordable machine will be able to serve all your applications to all your customers with zero maintenance cost ( because innovation will keep going on), you'll probably switch away from the cloud. it may be in a long time though..

amelius 10y ago

I think we should limit companies to a maximum of N employees. This will ensure more modularity in the market. And more competition as well, because barriers are lower.

gnu8 10y ago
I like this idea. Maybe we should limit governments to a population of N citizens for the same reasons.
cobbzilla 10y ago
interesting idea, impossible to enforce. we'd end up with even more contractors, and mega-conglomerates of hundreds of companies with ~N employees each.
true_religion 10y ago
I read a sci-fi story with this premise. Companies could only be as large as X before starting to pay prohibitively large taxes in order to stay 'for profit entities' or become companies devoted to the public good. So you'd end up with large telecoms who were non-profits dedicated to improving the level of global interconnectivity, and lots and lots of tiny 2-10 man companies that did research or sales.
- hello_asdf 10y ago
  Do you have a link to this? It sounds interesting, thanks.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

The fact that you're reading an article about a paper Google just published suggests it's not as closed as your doomsaying might suggest. Also the paper notes that Google is one of the largest contributors of bugs and CVEs to KVM, which is a security tide that will raise a lot of boats.

idlewords 10y ago
I don't think your use of "doomsaying" is fair, and detracts from a useful comment.

bitJericho 10y ago

This is how things have always been. It's the reason for our patent system, to incentivize companies to open up their proprietary tech.

zer0gravity 10y ago

> We are heading onto a more closed ecosystem than we are used to up until here. Not necessarily. Balancing forces always come up when this kind of things happen. The closing in of big players may give a big boost to open source hardware alternatives, which combined with the advent of 3d printing, may very well lead to the democratization of hardware...

jgalt212 10y ago

> gave us the immense positive benefit of moving all capex to opex Isn't it more correctly stated moving fixed costs to marginal costs? capex is mostly fixed, and opex is mostly variable, so you are not strictly incorrect.

stepanhruda 10y ago

http://opencompute.org http://opencompute.org proves the exact opposite

zengid 10y ago

Looking at what's going on in Shenzhen[1] in regards to hardware hacking, I'm not worried. [1] https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY

eva1984 10y ago

Thinking from another perspective, are those hardware just hardware? Not really, they are solutions, with tons of software supporting them. There is no point selling individual pieces, and they will not work out of box.

donavanm 10y ago

Is it really any different in practice? TPM is installed in basically every computer used in basically none. Even though its been a uniquitous "standard" for two decades its effectively impossible to correctly do attestation. Similar arguments could be made for UFI and similar. Just because some can write code for it only a handful of major suppliers actually do. Are those any more accessible than this?

taeric 10y ago

I think you would have a hard time showing this is any less closed than earlier days. For good and bad. IBM used to be at your door to replace hardware you didn't know was broken yet, and couldn't have fixed if you had known.