..and how host and federate (=connect) them.

Preface

This is an excerpt of a longer post about Stratus Sphere written in June 2014 by Valter Fukuoka.

Back then, Valter contacted me to discuss the concept when he discovered my proposal for permanent/personal clouds as alternatives to Facebook, Gmail etc... During the discussion, Valter shared the “Stratus Sphere ideas summarized below. At first sight, the only connection about our proposals seem to be that we both use the term “personal cloud”, but to use different things (I only refer to the software part, Valter to the whole “personal” infrastructure. With Valter’s agreement, I publish this excerpt anyway, inviting you to read the full post, because what I call percloud may be one of the software parts of Valter’s “personal cloud”, and because his “next step” outlines one of the ways to provide perclouds to everybody. As a matter of fact, many universities already ask so much for tuition, that they may surely afford to provide perclouds to their student without asking for extra money.

Stratus Sphere

It is clear that we live in a world “post” personal computer (the PC), where we have a large variety of compute devices (PCd), all of them at personal level.

Nowadays, we can choose to run applications “outside” the desktop PC and the smart-device, putting them into, for example, a Single Board Computer (SBC), exclusively dedicating it to run few specific apps (of functions, services).

As an example, you can use a cheap SBC to play music or videos, so that you don’t need to rely on the PC or the smart-device to listen to music or watch movies…

When we put all them together, the PC, smart-device and all other compute devices, what we have is a collection of compute devices that we can call: PERSONAL CLOUD! I am using the word STRATUS, because it is the technical name used to describe low altitude clouds in the sky, so, in this case, “low altitude” means a CLOUD inside the house or office, contrasting with the CLOUD which is “out there”…

It is no longer a PC or a smart-device, it is something else… So, the new PC is a Personal Cloud, with a variety of Personal Compute Devices connected… I personally believe that the PAIR SBC and Stratus will help make lots of interesting ideas into practical applications…

The next step

After accepting the notion that we all have a PERSONAL CLOUD at some level, then, then next logical step is to think about how to connected then together into a kind of peer to peer or federated fashion, so the idea of a Stratus Sphere is the “next thing” to think about…

When users of GNU/Linux operating systems want to download a fresh copy of installation disks, or when they want to update/upgrade their systems, they know that they can choose to download from a place near to them so that the download speed is higher… and lots of universities around the world offer the most common GNU/Linux software for download.

These universities offer to share their storage and bandwidth power because they themselves benefit from GNU/Linux and they want to help others to have access to the same benefits… and, in doing so, they become part of a LARGE POOL of download resources which in turn becomes part of the overall power of the GNU/Linux itself. This is a real example of organic cooperativeness to achieve a BIG POOL of resources… Then, if we think ONLY around organizations like universities and ask ourselves what if we can build a HUGE POOL of storage, compute power and bandwidth of all universities into a UNICLOUDPOOL? How immense this pool can be?

Continues here