Distributed Systems — challenging but necessary
In a world of billions of IoT devices producing data — which in many cases must be acted upon within milliseconds — distributed network, compute and data capabilities become increasingly important.
We have come to "Distributed" — the third in a series of seven key principles that you have to understand to succeed in the digital era; all are explained by Jason Hoffman, Head of Technology, Business Area Digital Services at Ericsson.
Expanding the number of global datacenters
The public cloud providers today typically operate their services from a couple of hundred of locations in total. To deliver meaningful services moving forward, the number of locations will have to grow to thousands and tens of thousands. This provides great opportunities for telecom operators. They already have a distributed infrastructure — the telecom network, including a vast number of sites where various equipment is placed. By utilizing that asset, they can for example deliver latency sensitive services.
Centralized systems — for example, two locations in a country or region — are straightforward to build and manage and do work well for many applications. But imagine autonomous driving: How do you collect data in an efficient way from millions of cars with very strict requirements on latency? That can only be done using distributed systems. Yes, it is a more challenging task, but also a necessity.
Listen to the Cloud Conversation podcast
In this podcast, Jason Hoffman, Head of Technology, Business Area Digital Services, dives into this further in this cloud conversations podcast with Dodi Axelson, Head of Ericsson News Desk: