Paradigm shifts in computing are as regular as waves on a beach, but it’s hard to see where they came from and even harder to see where there are going. The most recent large-scale shift was from servers to the cloud, driven by an acknowledgment that using commodity servers run by experts is a better choice for most businesses. Serverless APIs are the culmination of the cloud commoditizing the old hardware-based paradigm. The same process of commoditization that gave rise to the cloud will also bring about the next paradigm, moving the playing field to a new set of abstractions better suited to tomorrow’s applications.
“Make yourself a monopoly by growing the markets around you … Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.” — Joel Spolsky
This means making the hardware supply chain into a commodity if you make PCs, making PCs into commodities if you sell operating systems, and making servers a commodity by promoting serverless function execution if you sell cloud. What goes around comes around, as the cloud becomes the next commodity.
This new paradigm shift is from the cloud to the network. Protocol networks are groups of loosely affiliated enterprises that provide globally available services like ledger, compute, and storage. They run on any cloud or other data-center, and reward service providers through fees they collect from users. Smart contracts on systems like Ethereum are some of the first use cases, but runtimes like Socket Supply for network, utilities like Filecoin for storage, and APIs like Tableland for databases are also gaining popularity. Just as serverless is the culmination of the cloud, this move to protocol networks will culminate in cloudless APIs, leading to applications driven by protocols with incentives and capabilities that go beyond what the cloud’s location-based paradigm can offer.
This shift has an element of the inevitable, as it is also driven by the commoditization of complements. As protocols run across diverse environments while providing globally available services through a network of peers, they must grow resilient to worldly runtime challenges and accept their hosts as they come. Protocol-driven applications can migrate seamlessly to the lowest cost (or highest performance) provider, depending on workload and market conditions, setting the stage to commoditize the cloud.
Familiar examples of protocols insulating apps from the vagaries of implementations, and resulting in large-scale cooperation include DNS and HTTP which power the web, Ethereum and other blockchain technologies which harness peers to create immutable logs, the SWIFT message format enabling store-and-forward, etc. Most consumer-facing apps are not written in a location-independent way (yet) because the required infrastructure was not yet there for realizing the benefits. Those apps already written in this world have begun in a narrow niche — smart contracts and dapps. But the next wave to harness cloudless protocols is much bigger: social applications, asset delivery for gaming, metaverse, and media, and big data processing like transcode or map-reduce are among a few use cases that are seeing the benefits of cloudless protocols.
What are the benefits of network protocol-based cloudless computing over serverless cloud computing? Cloudless apps can be cheaper to run, as they have a stronger economic position relative to cloud providers. Infrastructure business will flow to whoever offers the most cost-effective solutions. Cloudless protocols offer developers more choices and enable new business models including app and data ownership (and cost) shared by users. At the heart of these protocols is cryptographic verification, and the key economic benefit is that workloads can move to the data - even across infrastructure boundaries - while respecting access control, capacity, and validation rules. This shows up for developers where it counts as cloudless identity, storage, and compute APIs. Cloudless protocols are enabled by cryptography so their ramifications may be more far-reaching than just a cheaper way to run the apps we already know.
Identity is the biggest positive contribution from the recent popular interest in cryptocurrencies. People from all walks of life have become familiar with the process of securely storing and using private keys, signing transactions (even multi-sig), and verifying hashes. At the same time experience factors like passkey (TouchID / FaceID) and secure enclave have overcome previous hurdles to the adoption of non-extractable keys, making users more familiar with delegation-based recovery flows. What all these new affordances have in common is that they maintain cryptographic key pairs capable of participating in cloudless protocols. This sets the stage for the next generation of applications to take advantage of business models and data flows that can only work because they leverage cryptographic guarantees. When we introduce UCAN distributed authorization later in the article, know that it is rooted in this sort of cryptographic identity.
An important aspect of the future of cloudless identity is that it is self-sovereign — that is, it relies on crypto keyrings controlled by end users. This allows individuals to have greater control and ownership over their data and online interactions, without relying on centralized service providers. In a market of service providers able to offer the same capabilities, you can easily take your business elsewhere because you own the keys — no lock-in possible.
In this model, preserving robust access to your accounts involves delegating capabilities to other cryptographic actors, whether that is your other devices, or an account recovery service (which can be distinct from your other service providers). The feel is more like using camera scanning, NFC, or PIN codes to pair a new phone with your existing device. Users recognize that as a secure pathway, so expect those device and user-centered workflows to become common on the web.
Verifiable data refers to data that can be independently verified and authenticated by a third party. This verification process typically involves the use of cryptographic techniques like digital signatures to ensure that the data has not been tampered with or altered in any way. Verifiable data matters most obviously when the integrity and authenticity of the data is important, such as in financial transactions or other sensitive information. In addition to securing the integrity of the data, cryptographic verifiability also ensures that the data comes from a trusted source and has not been tampered with during transmission. These security properties can also be used to reduce computing costs and improve performance.