Waiting for the seamless cloud

You may not have heard about memristor, the long sought fundamental circuit element (next to resistor, capacitor and inductor), but this invention can be the greatest revolution in computer industry since introducing the transistor. Memristors have simpler construction than transistors and don't require external power source to retain information. Last year Crossbar Inc. unveiled their RRAM non-volatile memory technology with shockingly impressive characteristics: 1 terabyte of data on a single chip with 20 times faster access than offered by traditional NANDs.

But this is just the beginning. When technology evolves, it may be able to replace not only flash drives, but also DRAMs, which will have a huge impact on the whole computer industry. Imagine a device with only one memory space, used both as data storage and for running applications. Moreover, applications are loaded into memory only once, and they stay there even when you turn the power off. You can take off the battery from the smartphone and replace it with a new one, and after turning the power on you instantly get your device just as you left it.

Sounds familiar? If you ever worked with Smalltalk you already know the whole idea. If you didn't, I strongly encourage you to try out Squeak or Pharo. They are both open source Smalltalk implementations, and they provide complete, object-oriented working environment. What is unique about Smalltalk is that you can start applications, create new workspaces, build classes and objects, and when you quit, the whole environment is saved in an image, and restored on the next session. At first sight it looks like simple hibernation, but it isn't. In Smalltalk you can build applications without writing the source code in a traditional way. You just create an object, dynamically add properties and methods to it, and it becomes a part of the current environment. When you want to distribute the application you just distribute the image, which has all the application code, libraries, and necessary tools.

RRAM is a technology which will eventually allow to implement the old Smalltalk idea on the hardware level and finally separate virtual machines from underlying hardware. Currently, every time a virtual machine crashes, a new instance needs to be started from scratch and configured. Although this process can be automated with tools like Puppet, it still takes time and makes applications run from scratch. With RRAM-based cloud the problem will not exist any more: you will be able to save the state of a virtual machine at any moment and than spawn it or move it to another physical location (server, rack unit, or even datacenter) within seconds. More important, the state of all the applications will be preserved, which means that, for example, you will not loose user sessions even if you move a virtual machine to another location.

In my opinion it will be a next big step in cloud computing evolution. Now the cloud instances are mostly stateless, and require external storage or cache to keep user data. With the new memory chips they will be able to preserve their state even while moving across different hardware, and this process will become absolutely seamless for the end user - just the same way the GSM networks work today, keeping your call running even when you switch between base transceiver stations while talking.