Personal Cloud Computing + Netbooks = Mobile Supercomputing?
I’ve been following Dave Winer’s trials and tribulations with Amazon’s EC2 of late and I think I just had an epiphany. Either that or I just spilled coffee on my lap, an unfortunate but common occurrence these days. Here’s the skinny on what Dave is doing, followed by my wild and crazy thoughts of a not-too-distant-future.
Essentially, Dave has documented the steps on how to create a virtual server in the cloud using Amazon’s EC2 service. He says you can do it in under an hour, but I suspect that’s a worst-case solution. I walked through the steps in around half that time, and it’s fairly straightforward to me. I followed the yellow-brick road that Dave has laid out and now have a Windows server running in the clouds of Oz. Note that I could have used Linux in lieu of Windows as well. Here I’m using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection app to see the server from my MacBook:
Bear in mind that you’ll pay between 10 and 80 cents per hour of server time for the virtual server and a small amount for data transfer, but the server doesn’t have to run 7×24x365. You have total control on when your server is up and running (and costing you money) or not. And you can install software on your server as needed.
So once you have your server in the clouds, what can you do? Here’s where it gets interesting, because I think the possibilities are practicaly limitless. As an example, let’s talk about something I do on a regular basis: encode high-definition video. Currently, I have two choices of where to do this: on a netbook or on my Apple MacBook. My netbook isn’t nearly as equipped to handle this as my MacBook, so when I’m out with my netbook, I generally wait until I get home to encode video. I might shoot high-def while out, but I’m limited in terms of producing and delivering that content until I get home. My netbook simply doesn’t have the horsepower to complete the task in a timely and efficient way. But it does have connectivity.
What if I used that connectivity and my own personal “cloud computer” at Amazon to do the heavy lifting for this task? Sure, I know HD content files are large and unwieldy. I’ll grant you that, but bear with me because mobile broadband is getting faster in the long term, not slower. WiFi is also readily available and fast enough for this task. Let’s think ahead here, and not be restricted by today’s constraints.
In a current or future situation like I’ve outlined, my netbook doesn’t need to be a powerhouse. Yet, when paired with a server in the cloud, it becomes a powerful tool, no? Maybe HD video isn’t the best example, but I think you get the idea. In fact, the concept aligns nicely with one that I’ve posed to Om, called “personal clouds.” In that vision of the future, I see applications and services that I use running at my home or on a hosted cloud: I simply connect my mobile device to the service. Think of it like a “Google Apps for Home,” where I have total control over the service and the data. Instead of finding various web services for what I want to do, I can set up my own personalized services.
In a way, I could accomplish all of this today by running a server with remote access out of my house, but most folks can’t or won’t do that. If Amazon (or anyone else for that matter) makes this easy and cost-effective, I foresee this as a much better option. Based on Dave’s instructions, I think that anyone who has a general familiarity with computers and the web can start to do this now.
Enough of my thoughts; what do you think? Try not to consider this in today’s terms but instead think a year or two out. What are the possibilities, pitfalls and potentials? Imagine if Amazon started bundling EC2 services with low-powered, low-cost netbooks. Hmmm…mature, personalized cloud services paired with a browsing device, an all-day battery and connectivity sounds quite appealing to me.
Kevin,
Is that windows 2000 Server you have running. I was thing about stting up a windows small business server 2003 for personal use. The price of hardware and software would be about $600.0. I know you have an IT background, wouldn’t that setup be better than depending on google for your contacts. You would have full exchange without the comprimises. I was looking at snow lepord OSX 10.6 and it nativley supports exchange. I think exchange is going to be the standard. What are your thoughts?
Thanks,
JHall – Joshua A. Hall
Joshua, it’s an instance of Windows Server 2003 running. This post isn’t really about “me” per se, so there’s no point in suggesting something that would be “better”. After working for several years in Windows data centers, I surely could set up a cheap home server. Then I’d have to manage it, power it, etc… neither is particularly appealing to me right now. Plus I’m not trying to solve a particular problem here; my example was just that: an example. This was meant more as a thought post on cloud computing for the not-so-distant future.
My work and personal data are both setup on Google at the moment, so I have no plans on running my own Exchange server or paying a monthly fee for someone else to run one for me. I’ve already done that and Exchange is overkill for my current needs. The point here isn’t to have a rock-solid e-mail and contact server. Think outside the box…
It’s a very interesting thought, and I think you’re right about the personal clouds concept. It got me thinking that there are already a load of companies building easily accessible storage services on top of Amazon’s S3 infrastructure (ZumoDrive, DropBox, Jungle Disk etc). I wonder if there’s an opportunity for companies such as these to build similarly consumer friendly front ends for creating cloud OS instances.?
As easy to follow as Dave’s instructions are, wouldn’t it be great to be able to log into a ZumoDrive style control panel and in 30 seconds boot up a full spec Mac Pro that you could run your video editing on?
People who use netbooks aren’t generally consumers let alone producers of HD content. Same goes for any other uses of servers, people who want to do this can afford fully-fledged laptops.
(And good GPU-accelerated encoding is going to be here before the necessary bandwidth increase.)
Hmmm… that means there are around 20m “geeks” out there who are the only netbook owners. And none of them are consumers.
See my comments above: the HD content example was simply that: an example.
I don’t follow you. Geeks are not the target audience audience for netbooks, which cater to the low end of the market. And people who use servers or even understand what a server is are geeks.
Making high-performance servers available to the average geek (who in general does not use a netbook) certainly has its uses, but the most important uses will be things that are too hard for a quad-core laptop with discrete GPU. E.g. scientific computing. (There are uses of servers/the cloud beyond computing power but this is the use being discussed here.)
Ack! You don’t “get me” because I misunderstood your comment. You wrote “People who use netbooks aren’t generally consumers let alone producers of HD content”. I took that as “people who use netbooks aren’t consumers *NOR* are they producers of HD content”. Sorry, my bad!
Wouldn’t connecting to a machine at home (for example your MacBook) be much more practical? I do this with my MacBook Pro all the time. Most of the times through ssh, but sometimes combined with VNC. You could even save energy by using WOL.
They already have a prepared image for your video conversion project: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=686&categoryID=202
Since they charge for bandwidth too that image must put a smile on the cash register when they build it out.
If I were doing a startup today I’d buy into Google Apps Premier and use the AWS for the PBX with some SIP trunking for the phone numbers. With the money saved on servers/racks/etc I could buy everyone Sony Vaio P’s for “desktops”/”desk phones” and they could work from practically anywhere.
So I don’t know about personal cloud but I certainly see this as the future of small to medium business IT.
What I do is run TightVNC server on my quad-core desktop and remote desktop into it from my notebook.
It works really well and is great for photoshop/encoding.
I even do most of my web browsing through it, the browser just runs faster.
Yup. You got it. I got my company to put a 4 core, 8GB RAM “powerhouse” placed in their server room for my statistics work. I RDC into it wherever I am (office, home, on the run). Initially I was gonna just run it from home to minimize my dealings with the IT department (though they turned out to be better then expected).
Right now I am migrating off my MBP and on to my Dell Mini 9 with OSX. A couple additional weeks of test time (while my internal SSD upgrade arrives) and I am putting the big monsterbook pro on the market. Stats (and a file server) can run on the big machine. The netbook can handle email, browsing, word processing and connecting to the server.
Though pay as you go service is an interesting idea. I wonder how much horsepower are we looking at. If it gets my high CPU jobs done significantly quicker then what I currently have I might be interested.
For me, personal cloud computing is more like running WHS at home that I can access from anywhere. And new hooks into MCE coming tomorrow.
Have you look at Microsoft’s Mesh? (https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/overview/Overview.aspx) It answers a lot of “personal cloud” computing needs, such as file, application and computer synchronization and availability.
This doesn’t seem that practical. As bandwidth increases, content sizes increase, and local processing power also increases. MP3 encoding used to take a lot of CPU time, but it was practical because bandwidth was so low. Now, it’s barely practical to upload raw audio, but you’d probably spend more time uploading to the cloud than encoding, even on a netbook. Video will continue to increase to the largest feasible resolution and bandwidth for quite a while yet; you don’t want to see what sorts of file sizes you get with lossless video.
I guess it could make sense to run video in the cloud if you’re transcoding to all manner of resolutions and bandwidth for optimal viewing on lots of devices, but that’s not a common consumer task.
You insist that video is just an example. I’ve been casually watching the high-performance computing community, and bandwidth is actually a really big issue. Very few interesting problems don’t require a large amount of bandwidth, and up to now the problems always increase to fill all available bandwidth.
Also, bandwidth isn’t increasing as smoothly as you’d like. The phone companies are evil, especially AT&T, and they’re dragging their feet on increasing bandwidth. Cell phone companies would rather you didn’t use their bandwidth. And WiFi gets really slow if you have a lot of neighbors, especially if they’re attached to the same access point, especially if it’s connected to DSL or something else relatively slow.
Now, I’ve been thinking that it might be practical to have a virtual desktop out in the cloud, that can be accessed by any computer where you happen to be. The data would already be in it, so bandwidth wouldn’t be a problem. But I wouldn’t classify that as supercomputing.
Interesting idea KCT and I would love to be able to send my encoding jobs to a server but as Scotty said it would be ridiculously expensive since S3 charges for the transfer of those large video files. You would also spend more time sending files than it would take for even a netbook to do encoding.
Very cool concept but it’s not here yet.
Levi seems to have a nice current solution but in my case I personally would still run into slow bandwith problems.
Sorry, but I think I am missing something. Amazon are charging the eauivalent of $2.40 – $19.20 per day that just about every other Virtual Hosting Server operation is offering for under $10 per month.
Is it me?
Another potential use of course is gaming. If a service that already stores my games, like steam, somehow manages to install and render the games the way quake online does it then we have a very cool new way to game on our little notebooks.
A virtual torrent server would also be awesome. Price permitting.
There seems to be some work done already on my latter wish.
Time to hit the virtual books!
This is a fascinating idea. It conjures visions of ubiquitous computing, with your data, programs and settings available from anywhere. In my case, latency would be a problem, but hopefully this issue will be solved over time. One advantage of this approach is that you would not be stuck with a rapidly-depreciating server to purchase and own. It is likely that Amazon will enjoy economies of scale which will lead to better infrastructure. You could concentrate your capital on acquiring a really nice display. But the speed (or lack therof) of the connection is the bottleneck which must be solved.
Kevin,
What I am really excited about is the use of the cloud for large scale on-demand testing as in exams. Heck, everyone can have their own personal tests as and when they need on demand based on how ready they are.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2343703,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532
I’d love for this to work. I wouldn’t mind using this for the more demanding games and leave my retro gaming for when I’m mobile.
The torrent server idea may be too expensive for now but next year it might just work.
WOOT