4 ms·
I think you are leaving out the data story. It is very difficult to push data to the edges, you can easily run into volume or consistency problems. No surpris
by gwright 5y ago
I think you are leaving out the data story. It is very difficult to push data to the edges, you can easily run into volume or consistency problems.
No surprise that this means that there is no single solution. Complexity sometimes makes sense at the edges and sometimes make sense in the core. It just depends.
I think we have a lot to learn about building systems that give us the flexibility to move things around as needed. Plan 9 was interesting from that point of view because it gave a way for edge resources and core resources to be composed via 9P at any place in the network.
- vidarh 5y agoI don't buy that data is a technical problem. It's a business problem in as much as holding users data hostage is central to a lot of business plan. All of the data in my Google account, for example, fits on a microsd card. Of course I want backups of it, and so I don't want to actually store it on a single microsd card, but the point is that this doesn't require much logic at the core. You can push processing to the edge while using a storage service. But you can push storage services towards the edge too. For a lot of data we already employ near write-once for the core of the data, which is ideally suited for synchronisation schemes over fully connected centralised storage. Your e-mail, and things like Google Photos are good examples. Consistency is less of a challenge than it might seem. It's a challenge if you're frequently disconnected from the network for extensive periods of time and might access and modify data from multiple disconnected devices in that period (note modify, not augment and create something new, which is easy to accommodate). But supporting that is very different from supporting mostly-local computation.