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Reflecting On Decentralization

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Reflecting On Decentralization

In the book club I help run at LinkedIn, we recently read the second edition of Token Economy by Shermin Voshmgir, and it was quite an interesting discussion that followed.

The heart of which goes back to the core ideas behind cryptocurrencies, a topic I’ve been writing about for a while now. Pretty fun to look back at my first article and see how much has changed since then, but also what hasn’t. 

Where Cryptocurrencies Began

Bitcoin is generally thought of as one of the first cryptocurrencies, with its whitepaper released in late October 2008. At the time, the US was going through some of its most significant financial market turmoils in history, and the timing of this whitepaper’s release was no accident. The core idea was to enable peer-to-peer payments, such that centralized financial institutions that were in that day and age failing left and right could be avoided when necessary. The whitepaper’s conclusion is about the peer-to-peer payment network’s secure trust mechanisms, the core of Bitcoin’s innovation. 

What this whitepaper did NOT say, however, is that the entire digital world needs to be decentralized and that all central ownership is evil. Somehow, though, this has seemingly become one of the underlying drivers behind the massive cryptocurrency explosion we have seen in the past several years. New tokens sprout daily to help decentralize some new piece of our digital world. 

When Decentralization Is Necessary

It’s with good reason that decentralization has become so hot. Especially in a political mindset, the idea of a system without centralized control by authority figures we don’t like has become very appealing. These days, one can turn on the news to see examples of authoritarians abusing their centralized power.

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A decentralized system is more inclusive and resistant to manipulation, but such systems are rare. The United States started as such a system, or at least there was a very deliberate effort towards creating a political government where no single entity had absolute power, that there would be “checks and balances.” Over time, that separation has eroded through various laws, global events, and evil leaders, making decentralization sound even more intriguing, even in the US.

While the government is perhaps the best example of where decentralization is effective, the idea that decentralized alternatives should replace all current financial companies seems silly. Yes, centralization in the banking industry likely caused the 2008 crisis, and having checks and balances to counterweight that behavior is essential. But that doesn’t mean that we need to replace these institutions outright!

By combining centralized and decentralized systems, we will find the right balance that helps serve everyone best. It’s going to be about striking a balance, but in our times’ social media extremism, that position gets lost in the noise of either extreme. 

Token Economy

This leads us back to Token Economy, which discusses a LOT of various areas of the cryptocurrency space in textbook-level detail. It helps to explain all of the underlying security mechanisms while also describing how decentralized organizations are created and function and much more. Through this, while not stating it explicitly, there is a clear perspective that decentralization is good everywhere, which is something I’m not sure I agree with. While I’m happy to have alternatives to the centralized banking system for when things are in crisis and banks aren’t behaving (or have shut down), in my everyday life, I don’t want to have to think about all those details. Handing over that complexity to a centralized authority that I trust (at that moment, perhaps not always) is more scalable for me to live my life the way I want to. 

There’s also an incongruity in the push for decentralization. Most of the solutions thus far in Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) governance involve elections for representatives to join board-style discussions and vote since it is otherwise unfeasible to have all individuals participate at scale. The similarities with existing governmental structures are no mistake: our governments work, so we borrow from that success. While our governments don’t necessarily work the way we want them to, they do function, and it is only logical for that system design to make its way into the token economy.

So What?

Reading Token Economy might not be worth it for everyone; it’s more of a reference textbook than a nonfiction book anyways. But my crucial conclusion after having read it is that cryptocurrencies and the ideas behind them are not going anywhere because they are so intertwined with the general political zeitgeist of our time. There will continue to be innovation in the cryptocurrency space for years to come; just like innovation in most technology-related fields, we are in a continuing acceleration of technological development in which cryptocurrencies are just a tiny sliver. This general acceleration will likely continue to make the entire cryptocurrency market grow, making it an exciting space for speculation and investment. Still, will everything be decentralized and on a blockchain in the coming years? I don’t think so, primarily because we don’t need it to be. However, that doesn’t take away from the value that cryptocurrencies will provide the world. It doesn’t always have to be a winner take all game; we can and will find a middle ground.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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