Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 87 | Page 44

CIO OPINION
The foundations of the Supercloud are compute and data services that make running any size application efficient and infinitely scalable without the baggage of the cloud as it exists today .
John Graham-Cumming , CTO , Cloudflare

Welcome to the Supercloud – built for scale and performance

John Graham-Cumming , CTO , Cloudflare , explains how the cloud was not designed for what it must become . He introduces us to the concept of ‘ Supercloud ’ – a global network that ’ s everywhere everyone is , bound together by software that turns the globe into a single cloud that is performant , scalable , available , private and cost-efficient .

In Cloudflare ’ s S-1 document there ’ s a section that begins : “ The Internet was not built for what it has become ”.

That sentence expresses the idea that the Internet , which started as an experiment , has blossomed into something we all need to rely upon for our daily lives and work . And that more is needed than just
The cloud was not designed for what it must become . the Internet as was designed ; it needed security and performance and privacy .
Something similar can be said about the cloud : the cloud was not designed for what it must become .
The introduction of services like Amazon EC2 was undoubtedly a huge improvement on the old way of buying and installing racks and racks of servers and storage systems , and then maintaining them .
But by its nature the cloud was a virtualisation of the older real world infrastructure and not a radical rethink of what computing should look like to meet the demands of Internet-scale businesses . It ’ s as
44 INTELLIGENTCIO MIDDLE EAST www . intelligentcio . com