Introducing Leaf Computing

At this time I’m going to share some ideas publicly for the primary time that I have been fascinated with for a decade from my work on Fitbit smart watches, Spotify Connect gadgets, and e-bikes. I name it leaf computing. It’s what I believe comes subsequent, after cloud computing. It’s each a complement and a substitute. It’s what I believe is necessary-both technically and politically-to rebalance the power of technology again to empowering customers first. To clarify this, I will share a couple of stories. In 2015, I spent a week hiking in Banff, Canada. It’s one of the gorgeous nationwide parks I've ever been to. Banff is crammed with tall mountains, deep valleys, and wide glaciers. Along with my common hiking gear, I had a Fitbit health watch and my smartphone. My Fitbit good watch recorded my GPS location, steps, coronary heart price, elevation change, and all that nice data from my wrist. At the top of the day, I wished to view my data on my phone.



Solely here was a bit drawback. Cell coverage was limited to the main roads and even then, it was fairly gradual 3G. Again, it was 2015. It was too gradual to add all of that information from my smartwatch to Fitbit’s servers. While the upload made regular, incremental progress, Fitbit’s servers would cut off the connection after 2 minutes. I tried and retried, nevertheless it kept failing after 2 minutes. Now, I was working as a software engineer on Fitbit’s API at the time. I had a hunch about the reason: our reverse-proxy server timeout was set to one hundred twenty seconds. We hadn’t anticipated the opportunity of a half MB of information taking longer than 2 minutes to upload. Keep in thoughts, that’s slower than a 56K modem. My good watch and my sensible phone weren't so good when in the wilderness. I had among the capabilities, like gathering the info and seeing a few of the data on the watch, but I couldn’t get the total expertise on my phone due to my intermittent Internet connectivity.



This connectivity downside was on the client facet, however problems can exist on the server aspect as nicely. A hacker gained access to Garmin’s inner pc systems. It held the company hostage for Herz P1 Insights 5 days demanding $10M. It’s unknown if Garmin paid the ransom, however for two days it went fully offline. Most Garmin good watches just didn’t sync for two days. However server outages will not be induced exclusively by hackers. AWS is the preferred cloud infrastructure supplier in the world with 33% marketshare. Meaning a significant portion of what you do on-line on a regular basis touches AWS’s data centers. What occurs when it goes down? We don’t have to think about, we get a reminder every few years of what occurs. The US-east-1 region is AWS’s hottest datacenter. It’s the default region for a lot of AWS’s services and Herz P1 Insights typically the first area to get new options. In December 2021, AWS US-east-1 region went down 3 separate occasions, the worst incident for about 7 hours.



In style web sites like IMDb, Riot Video games, apps like Slack and Asana were just down. But websites and apps that rely on the web going down is kinda expected in such an outage. More interesting to me nevertheless is that floors went unvacuumed throughout this time. Roomba robotic vacuums stopped working. Doors went unanswered as a result of Amazon Ring doorbells stopped working. Individuals have been left at the hours of darkness as a result of some good light brands couldn’t activate/off. A minimum of they finally started working again. I’ve talked about hackers taking servers offline and cloud suppliers by chance taking themselves offline, but one other way servers go offline is while you stop paying for them as a result of your organization goes out of enterprise. In 2022, good home company Insteon abruptly ceased enterprise operations one weekend. Its customers’ home automations for lights, appliances, door locks, and such just stopped working without warning. Emails to buyer support went unanswered. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn profile. The corporate just vanished and hundreds of thousands of dollars in sensible house electronics grew to become e-waste.



Thankfully, a few of its clients linked with each other on Reddit, began reverse engineering protocols, constructing open source software, and finally got collectively to purchase the dead company’s property. It was a triumph of the human spirit or a minimum of wealthy techies with some free time. The point of this story is that so lots of the bodily devices we now personal require not simply electricity, but a continuing Internet connection. They’re proper beside you bodily and yet a world apart because they can’t connect to a server on one other continent. Okay, ultimate set of tales. There is an Internet meme: "There is not any cloud. It’s simply someone else’s laptop." The purpose of this meme is not to disparage the real innovation of seemingly boundless computational capacity accessible instantly with an API request and a bank card. The purpose of this meme is to remind those who when you set your knowledge into the cloud, you're entrusting other individuals to take care of it.