At the Structure Conference in San Francisco, Urs Hölzle, Google employee #8 and senior vice president for technical infrastructure said consumers shouldn’t have to care about their cloud infrastructure. This isn’t just for the sake of convenience, but has tangible benefits for businesses.
For cloud infrastructure, Hölzle sees customers worry about “machine type” going the way of the Dodo. He hopes that by 2021, 99% of customers never even think about it. Accordingly, this would give infrastructure companies tremendous latitude to explore innovations, since it will be outside the purview of everyone else. All customers would see are the benefits in performance.
Hölzle does see a few bottlenecks to an infrastructureless cloud (my phrase – somewhat tongue-in-cheek). Specifically flash storage, which he hopes future non-volatile flash advances soon mitigate.
Conner Forrest comments:
In the ideal situation, Hölzle said, the customer wouldn’t need to even think about picking the machine type for their cloud strategy. It is something that Google should determine for the customer—Hölzle called it “infrastructure getting out of the way.”
Read more at: Google’s Hölzle on why customers shouldn’t have to care about cloud infrastructure
