The next major shift: revamping cloud computing with the programmable internet
The Internet, despite all its glory as a transcendent technology, requires maintenance and improvement just like any other digital technology. Based on a set of open, standardized protocols, the Internet is a convoluted and often daunting concept to approach.
Its core protocols exist in a layered, modular stack, and serve various functions, some of which are beginning to show how outdated they are.
As we progress into Web 3.0 technologies, extracting metrics for applications that capture user-value are often the purview of venture capital groups. However, several projects are pushing the envelope in a different dimension, revamping some of the underlying open protocols of the Internet itself — ushering in better connectivity, network resiliency, and bandwidth improvements.
Progressing From Software-as-a-Service to Internet Backbone-as-a-Service
The advent of cloud computing has seen a meteoric rise of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, more specifically the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, which is expected to balloon to $63 billion by 2021.
Giant firms like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft dominate the cloud computing market, which has empowered many of the modern consumer and business application possibilities of today.
However, there are current limitations in the cloud computing paradigm. For example, content delivery networks (CDNs) are not widely accessible in developing areas of the world, precluding many millions of people from tapping into basic online services like YouTube. Similarly, the centralization of cloud computing providers can lead to outages, disrupting numerous services around the world.
An excellent recent example is the downing of CloudFlare, one of the most popular CND service providers in the world, which led to vast portions of the Internet becoming unavailable.
Solutions to such problems focus on multi-cloud computing or creating a more distributed and robust set of cloud computing resources. “Multi-cloud infrastructure enables an organization to use multiple vendors, thereby spreading the risk. And not only can risk of disruption of service due to outages be mitigated through such a manner, additional benefits can be derived as well,” details Vytas Pacas of NOIA Network.
One of the hurdles facing such a multi-cloud infrastructure is the reliance on a set of fragmented content delivery protocols like BGP, which result in connectivity problems and an inability to guarantee performance without using an overlay network.
That’s where an emerging startup, NOIA Network, has proposed a unique supplementation to the multi-cloud infrastructure future, an Internet-as-a-backbone (IaaB) networking service for cloud providers.
NOIA Network Brings on William B. Norton to Lead IaaB Charge
NOIA Network is comprised of the largest open-source repositories for a P2P CDN, called NOIA Cache, which is a mechanism for enabling individual infrastructure providers, ISPs, cloud providers, and other resource administers to connect to their blockchain-based NOIA backbone and sell infrastructure (e.g., bandwidth) as Internet transit.
“Much like Waze routed cars to alternative routes to bypass congested highways, machine learning will dynamically adjust the topology of contributed network segments to optimize routing for its participants,” detailed William B. Norton, co-founder of Equinix. “The entire community benefits from better Internet connectivity, and blockchain handles the settlement between participants.”
The concept correlates to Norton’s extensive, and lauded, work with Internet peering technologies, of which he considered a foremost expert. NOIA Network recently announced their onboarding of Norton, who is expected to unveil a whitepaper detailing the dynamics of the retail infrastructure and sharing economy that NOIA will focus on.
The core of NOIA’s infrastructure is based on a confluence of IPv6, distributed ledgers, and segment routing — thus incentivizing users to share computational and networking resources in exchange for the native NOIA token. By creating a “programmable backbone” of more robust routing protocols, NOIA can help reduce operational costs, increase performance, and even help more obscure locales to maintain connectivity with cloud service providers.
Norton’s experience at Equinix, the largest data center operator in the world, led him to publish numerous papers on peering technologies and a popular book, which helped lay the foundation for NOIA’s trajectory. Considering the talented ensemble of experts already at NOIA’s disposal, Norton’s addition to the team positions them well for disrupting the current cloud computing landscape by minimizing public Internet latency through smart data and standardized routers.
“Bill is an internet business expert with a wide range of experience — having worked with both large tech companies and startups,” detailed Domantas Jaskunas in the NOIA blog announcement.
“His role in the development of Programmable Internet & the evolution of NOIA has been decisive, and we’re excited to have such a talented team, including world-renowned experts and entrepreneurs from various fields, each contributing to the vision of the next-generation internet,” Jaskunas continues.
With a high-profile Internet peering figure at the helm of their P2P CDN, NOIA endeavors to disrupt the massive cloud infrastructure market and revamp some of the Internet’s old pathways in the process.