For several years now I've been building companies, watching, working and researching. Finally, things are getting interesting again since that initial cloud computing rush back in 2007! At just about the time most businesses have accepted the cloud in the likes of AWS or Google Cloud their replacement is already on the horizon. Soon, centralized cloud hosting services will no longer be needed. You see, there a new stack on the horizon that is distributed, serverless in the traditional sense, always on and will have a near zero marginal cost of operations at nearly any scale. This will empower entire new classes of applications that have never been feasible.
Most computing is about three things. Compute, Storage and Networking. I went over that in an article I wrote here years ago called "Cloud Computing: Back Down to Earth." It was 20 August 2008. I discussed what a computer is and how that might translate to a cloud computer. Later on 17 April 2011 I posted about Cloud Native Applications.
Fast forward five more years and we have bitcoin, the bitcoin blockchain, IPFS, Ethereum, Ethereum Swarm and an interesting hybrid called IOTA. We actually have a cloud computer and can create truly cloud native applications! Those applications do not require data centers to run. They have the potential to disintermediate the major cloud providers over time.
Develop an application as a full stack client side application that can run on any device. Give that application effectively infinite storage, networking and compute that comes from the users that use the application itself. Your costs to deploy this are effectively zero. The demand will generate the supply you need when you need it! This is your compute.
Store all the applications and their data securely on an IPFS or Ethereum Swarms with security and veracity protected by blockchain-like technology. That's your new server hard drive. This is your storage.
This be peer to peer and fully distributed. You will no longer require a server. Bandwidth usage will be spread over the nodes and up/down links of the users. Collectives of people acting through automated consensus mechanisms to remove any need at all for even centralized services and decision making. For example, look at what is happening with TheDAO and the evolution of smart contracts.
It feels strange and archaic to me to deploy physical servers myself today for almost any purpose. I'm not deploying them by the container of course like some very large players. The last time I personally deployed physical servers myself was around 2010 with my company nScaled. Enterprise didn't much trust "the cloud" then. In a few years more I suspect we will feel similarly marshaling compute, storage and networking via virtualized or containerized services from what we call the cloud today (eg. AWS or Google). At that point, effectively the data center will have been dematerialized and decentralized. You do this today already in early forms with IPFS and Ethereum. It's just a matter of time and the apps you write that live client side but operate similar to the ways that networks like Kazza or Bittorrent have in the past will seem natural. Oh, and one other little side effect. The SaaS model will die as well. It simply will not be necessary.
It's cloud all the way to the edge.