Bordoni Seminars: “Distributed cloud, supercomputing, and web 3.0.”

Thanks to cloud architectures, business models such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and, more recently, BlockChain-as-a-service (BaaS) have emerged in recent years. These models have profoundly changed the structure and operation of digital markets, leading to the rise of OTT (over-the-top) companies and the concentration of many services and functions in the hands of a few global players.

Cloud architecture’s success is also a first step towards the Semantic Web, where the Internet is presented as an intelligent network of structured and connected data, accessed by “meaning” and not by location.

The development of the “cloud” has seen an increasing concentration of computing and storage resources. Large server farms, great efficiency in the management of retrieval and backup operations, but also an increase in the concentration in the market of operators able to efficiently manage these systems and an increase in the vulnerability of the systems due to the easy identification of single points of failure.

On the contrary, the development of 5G networks will enable an inverse process to the one that so far has led to the development of cloud infrastructures.

The centralisation of WEB 2.0 can be replaced by a decentralisation of computing and storage systems. Thanks to distributed ledger and distributed hash table technologies and the need to develop distributed computing power at the periphery of the network (edge computing), the development of a “distributed web” will increasingly compete with the centralisation of the cloud model.

What are the pros and cons of the two scenarios? Which of the two is the preferable scenario for a democratic and efficient development of the Web? What is the true practical potential of distributed computing or storage systems such as iEx.ec or Inter Planetary File System (IPFS)? An attempt to answer these questions will be made during the third Bordoni Seminar scheduled for 2019.