Future is Autonomous Cloud (Part-IV): Connected Intelligent Nodes era (Autonomous Cloud)

(Part-III): Mobility World and the fight for the Future https://medium.com/@avneeshbalyan/future-is-autonomous-cloud-part-iii-mobility-world-and-the-fight-for-the-future-a6d92e532904

With 5G is about to become a dominant (or atleast main emerging mobile standard), Cloud availability as well as adaptability becomes the norm. Artificial Intelligent (AI)/Machine learning(ML) have become a part of software deployment ecosystem and machine-to-machine communication including IoT has displaced the human-to-human communication as the key architectural force behind communication networks evolution. AI/ML impact is not just limited to core computing and communications technologies, but changing the medical diagnosis as well as drug inventions in pharmacology, transport industry with focus on Autonomous vehicles, etc. All these factors will become the building blocks of next evolution path of high tech industry. 2020s will be the new era for computing and it will either create new players or the current players have to evolve to adopt the new paradigm.

Autonomous Vehicle will be a critical domain which all the big companies will try to capture. The sheer market in terms of dollars and its interaction with consumers (almost everyone uses transportation service in one form or other) will make this market key battleground for the current titans. Along with autonomous vehicle units, the complex, integrated and global supply chain will attract the companies to provide end to end solutions. The spillover of technology in the autonomous vehicles ecosystem, like automation in production, efficient battery production, fraud prevention as well as global supply chain management, will have a huge impact on Industry 4.0. This impact may be as powerful as an assembly line production system invention by Ford in the early part of last century.

In all scenarios, Autonomous Vehicle will be the antithesis of Mobile devices in terms of computational needs but the extension of core principle of “personal experience” of mobile world. It will be equivalent to the WINTEL era with a need of maximum raw computational power availability and complex computational needs at the end point. But autonomous vehicle ecosystems will flourish with Cloud as the core component of the computational ecosystem.

The autonomous vehicles will be equivalent to “Small smart Industrial Units” in itself. The central processor unit will communicate and manage multiple autonomous sub-units, large numbers of internal sensors with their own decision making capabilities as well as external sensors from lasers to mobile connectivity. By the end of this new decade, with an onset of level-5 autonomous vehicles, the unit will be equivalent to a Private Cloud of intelligent mobile units with AI/ML based decision making capabilities.

We are going to see the similar evolution of technology and deployment in other sectors too. The omnipresent and always-available 5G requirements as well as consumer expectations will lead to new approach to network deployment based on autonomous edge cloud functionality. The smart buildings and connected homes as well as cities will need new computing nodes deployment architecture and technologies. Any deployment with dependency on remote cloud/server farm will be unacceptable to the market as well as consumer.

Companies which will find and create the differentiator at this “web of processing units” will play a critical role for the next decade or more. At this point, no company has competency at all the levels of an evolving ecosystem. The agile corporations which will be able to move to each other domains and shake the field will become major players.