Cloud computing is set to come to an end, eclipsed by the shift in computational power to "the edge".
That is the claim of Peter Levine, a venture capital investor with Andreesen Horowitz, the venture capital company co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen. "I think it's actually happening right under our nose," he added, suggesting that the process had already started.
It won't be led by mobile devices, as much as it will be by connected devices, such as self-driving cars, drones and other increasingly powerful devices operating on 'the edge' of the network, he said.
"It's not just mobile devices, it's all of the other things that are going to be out at the edge that will truly transform cloud computing and put an end to what we know as cloud," Levine told the Wall Street Journal's CIO Network event last week.
"The change is that the edge is going to become a lot more sophisticated. Not with mobile devices but, broadly speaking with the internet of things (IoT). Examples are self-driving cars, drones, robots and all the IoT 'objects' that will be created over the next ten years," he said.
A self-driving car, he added, "is effectively a data centre on wheels, a drone is a data centre with wings, and a robot is a data centre with arms and legs
"These devices are collecting vast amounts of information, and that information needs to be processed in real time. That is, with the latency of the network and the amount of information there isn't the time for that information to go back to the central cloud to get processed This shift is going to obviate cloud computing as we know it," argued Levine.
A typical luxury car today has around 100 CPUs in it, while self-driving cars will have even more, alongside arrays of maths co-processors to do complex, real-world 3D computations in real-time. This, suggested Levine, will become a "massive distributed computing system at the edge of the network".
He added: "We are entering the next world of distributed computing it's literally back to the future on where processing gets done because of these very sophisticated end-point devices."
It comes at a time when computers are, for the first time, able to take information directly from the environment.
"Up until now, computing has fundamentally been us humans typing things in via keyboard or a computer generating information from a database or generating log files. But this is the first time that computers are starting to [directly] collect the world's information and that data is massive.
"So it's real-world information coupled with the idea that real-time data processing will need to occur at the edge where the information is collected."
Levine cites the example of self-driving cars needing to be aware of their surroundings, such as stop signs at junctions or pedestrian crossings.
"If I had to take that data and send it off to the cloud to decide that there's a stop sign, or a human being crossing the road, that car will have blown through the stop sign and run over ten people" before the cloud would have told the self-driving car to stop.
Levine's comments echo David Isenberg's May 1997 paper, 'Rise of the Stupid Network', which argued that a combination of cheap and plentiful bandwidth, combined with ever-more power devices, would lead to power migrating to the edge of the network, while bandwidth would become a commodity.
The paper didn't go down well with Levine's employers, telecoms giant AT&T, and he left the company shortly after the paper was published.
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'Cloud computing is coming to end,' claims Andreesen Horowitz VC - http://www.computing.co.uk