The Clouds of Revolution

The Internet has been revolutionizing society for four decades. Old timers have seen four Internet revolutions in their lifetimes: TCP/IP (1970s), Email and Usenet (1980s), the Web and its search engines (1990s), and social networking and Web commerce (2000s). We are now on the brink of the next revolution, which will bring the Internet to a new level of functionality [1,2]. The new revolution is based on cloud computing and the concept of elasticity. Any Internet application will be able to access immense computational and storage resources for short time periods. Cloud resources are typically sold according to a “pay per use” principle. This means that the product of the amount of resources and the time they are used is approximately proportional to the cost. For a given cost, large amounts of resources can be made available for short times. This is analogous to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics, which makes available arbitrarily high energies if the time period is short enough. We call it the computational Heisenberg principle. There already exist common applications that use this principle. For example, Google Search has revolutionized the way people use the Web. It is based on the PageRank algorithm, which needs vast computational and storage resources. Applications that use vast resources in short bursts will become ubiquitous and lead to qualitative enhancement of many Internet operations, making them much more intelligent.