Intelligent CIO North America Issue 29 | Page 42

FEATURE : CLOUD

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SUPERCLOUD ARE COMPUTE AND DATA SERVICES THAT MAKE RUNNING ANY SIZE APPLICATION EFFICIENT AND INFINITELY SCALABLE WITHOUT THE BAGGAGE OF THE CLOUD AS IT EXISTS TODAY .

has to keep hot standby VMs in case there ’ s a flood of visitors . Just as MapReduce ( which traces its heritage to the lambda calculus ) scales up and down , so should general purpose computing .
And it ’ s not just about scaling . In the Supercloud both code and data are mobile and move around the network . Attach data to the code ( such as with Durable Objects ; hello Actor model ) and you have a foundation for applications that can scale to any size and move close to users as needed to provide the best performance .
Alternatively , if your data is immovable , we move your code closer to it , no matter how many times you need to access it .
Not only that but working at this level of flexibility means that code enforcing a data privacy or data residence law about where data can be processed or stored can operate at the level of individual users or objects . The same code can behave differently and even be executed in a completely different country based on where its associated data is stored .
A Supercloud has two interesting effects on the cost of running a program . Firstly , it makes it more economical because you only run what you need . There ’ s never any need for committed VMs waiting for work , or idle machines you ’ re paying for just in case . Code either runs or it doesn ’ t . It scales up and down as needed . You only pay for precisely what you need .
Secondly , it creates a more efficient compute platform which is better for everyone . It forces the compute platform ( e . g . us ) to be as efficient as possible . We have to be able to start code quickly for performance and scale up reasons .
We need to efficiently use CPUs because no customer is paying us to keep idle CPUs around . And it ’ s better for the environment because cloud machines run at very high levels of utilization .
This level of efficiency is what allows our platform to scale to the 10 million requests that Cloudflare Workers processed in the time it took you to read the last word of this sentence .
And this compute platform scales well beyond a machine , or a data center , or a country . With the right software ( which we ’ ve built ) it scales to the size of the Internet . Software allocates resources automatically across the globe , moving connections , data and
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