at a Google Next conference two years ago and watched a colleague who knew
very little about machine learning models train a model in less than 20 lines of
code. My jaw hit the ground.
Not only are the cloud providers making the technology simple to consume,
but they are greatly reducing the time to market and cost of entry. In industries
like genomics and space research, companies are able to perform research that
was not even feasible or even possible in the on-prem and DIY model.
Source: Google Cloud Platform
Figure 2: Sample Big Data Architecture on Google Cloud Platform
The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things introduces a whole new set of technical challenges
because of the exabytes of data that need to be processed live outside of our
datacenters or clouds. Building your own IoT architecture requires Herculean
efforts. Have no fear though. Public cloud platforms have provided a collection
of APIs that interface with your devices and provide the necessary ingestion
capabilities, security framework, workflow and infrastructure to simplify and
streamline your IoT processes. AWS has even partnered with some of the major
chip-makers to embed a SDK on chip for developers to perform processing out
on the edge.
Here’s another advantage of the cloud. Architects building IoT applications can
leverage their existing security, networking and deployment architectures that
are the result of previous work building other applications. This is the beauty
of what the cloud providers are offering their customers. As companies mature
in the cloud and move to the more advanced technology concepts like IoT,
intelligent apps, blockchain, and others, they get to build on top of existing
investments. Each new managed service comes fully integrated with existing
security, logging and monitoring frameworks.
Where do we go from here?
IoT, 3D printing, robotics, virtual and augmented reality, drones and many
other emerging technologies all leverage the cloud in some fashion. All of these
technologies produce huge amounts of data or perform various algorithms
54 | THE DOPPLER | SUMMER 2017