What are the key technological
themes and foundations that make this stream-driven architecture
work? They are as follows:
1. Cloud computing – The
availability of large amounts of processing power in the cloud is a major
ingredient to the innovation that has led to so many software services being
available to power the Web OS. Services like Amazon Web Services are
responsible for making an entire new breed of start-ups and software
engineering endeavours possible. Powerful, always available and elastic
computing resources are at the heart of the modern right-time Web revolution.
Put simply, real-time streams need an engine that’s always collecting and pumping
out data. Cloud-computing gives us the engine power in abundance.
2. Open APIs – I really
ought to say “Open Innovation,” which is more about the ethos of so many Web
2.0 projects and services. What works, and what powers the right-time Web, is the
low-friction APIs that enable services to easily share data. Without APIs,
there would be no Twitter and no successful stream-based services on the Web.
We can contrast the text-messaging world, which is closed,14 with the IP world,
completely open, and witness how literally thousands of new messaging services
and paradigms have emerged on the Web versus mobile.With mobile we are still
stuck with the one mode of messaging, which is texting, virtually unchanged
since its introduction in the 1990s.
3. Open and Portable formats – This
often gets overlooked, but I think that it is going to become increasingly
important, reaching a tipping point soon. If we didn’t have base data formats
like XML and JSON, we might well be stuck in a swamp of indecipherable data formats
that would be difficult to move from one system to another. In other words,
with XML and JSON-derived messages, it’s as if the whole Web decided to speak
English, just like the business world (by and large). And, just as with
business, the availability of a common intermediate language has had
significant effect on productivity. Layered on top of this, we have
micro-formats, RDF and other ways to bring structure and meaning to these
JSON-ified communications across the Web.
4. SocialWeb – The
transformation of theWeb, from its 1.0 “info-centric” nature to the more encompassing
2.0 world of “people-centric” and “service-centric” architectures, paved the way
to the right-time Web. When we talk about “Right-Time,” we automatically ask
“right time for whom?” Clearly, we mean people, not things. Ultimately, it is
people who want the right information at the right time. Machines help the
information to get there, but it is people who use the Web! The emergence of
deep social structures on the Web has had profound impact on the way developers
build services. Oddly enough, users are now becoming a lot more important in
our thinking when designingWeb software systems and applications. What I mean
is that by tapping into the user’s context and connections, which is becoming
easier, developers can offer even more compelling services than they otherwise
might. The social Web can transform and invigorate even a relatively mundane
online service, like purchase ordering, adding new meaning to the suppliercustomer
relationship.
5. Telco 2.0 elements – If
we’re talking about people and social connectivity, then we have to include the
massively successful phenomenon that is mobile, especially voice and messaging.
After all, whilst data is exciting and very much the future, it is still a
relatively small number of the overall mobile community who use data services
in any substantial way. The majority of mobile users are still making calls and
exchanging texts. Of course, this is slowly changing, but voice and reliable
person-to-person messaging will be a strong requirement for all of us for the
foreseeable future. The death of voice is much exaggerated (by a small band of
geeks who simply don’t want to answer their phones anyway16). However, in terms of the
right-time Web, then it will become a lot more powerful when we can mash the voice
services world directly with the Web. This is happening slowly with companies
like Telefonica buying Jajah and opening up new types of service. It is
happening with platform plays like Tropo and Twilio. Opportunity? Network as a Service.
6. Big Data – Big Data’s
role in Right-time Web should hopefully be clear. We not only need to maintain
and support all these vast streams of data, which are ultimately flowing from
one data store to another, but we need filters! There’s simply too much
information to handle. Users are overwhelmed already. What we need is the
ability to process the streams and extract the right information.
This is a multi-variate problem as it applies across all the streams at once.
Finding patterns across streams and extracting meaning is most definitely a Big
Data problem! Doing it in real-time, which is non-trivial, but possible, is
what gives us the right-time Web. With these six elements, plus others we could
explore, the Web OS has the right architecture to support a “right-time”
modality – an array of streams between source end-points and destination
end-points that are increasingly converging on the mobile, particularly the smartphone
with its various smarts that make it an ideal filter and consumption device for
these streams, able to feedback context information that modulate the streams
both at source and the destination.
It's taken from:
CONNECTED SERVICES: A Guide To
The Internet Technologies Shaping The Future Of Mobile Services And Operators.
By Paul Golding.
While I'm studying for final exam in the subject Connected Service and Cloud Computing.
I hope it can be useful for you :)
Good luck for the exam!
May the 4th be with you!
Bandung, May the 4th 2014
Hesti Nuraini
