In the not-to-distant future, whether its 10 years or 15 years from now, high performance bare-metal servers will be replaced by affordable quantum computers. In a decade, a 2-U quantum computer is likely to outperform the Google data center of today. Even today’s most advanced software, be it caching, big data, machine learning, log management, messaging brokers, database, file systems, and so on will be completely replaced by quantum software architecture, whatever it might be.
From Google to Akamai to Facebook to AWS, the hundreds of billions of dollars invested on infrastructure will no longer be useful in the era of quantum compute. Everything we know about infrastructure will be completely replaced. In quantum compute, 0’s and 1’s take on a new form as quantum bits or qubits. Quantum computers solve many problems, especially when it comes to power consumption. One quantum computer uses 25kW of power vs 2500kW’s of power required by the supercomputer. The D-Wave 2000Q system is available with 2,000 qubits, that outperforms classical servers by a factor 1,000 to 10,000 according to some benchmarks. And the D-Wave 2000Q system of today is going to be like an Intel 286 computer vs the ones that come out in a decade.
The only bottleneck in the CDN PoP architecture of the future is the fiber network. Although there’s nothing faster than the speed of light, today’s WAN architecture forces packets to travel through glass, along multiple hops around the world, which adds a tremendous amount of latency to delivery. Therefore, in the future there will be no more fiber networks. Instead, packets are likely to travel through satellite or cellular networks that use light as a communications medium. Maybe its time to start thinking about the future, because the kind of progress mankind is making in the tech world today, quantum computing might be right around the corner, like 5 to 10 years.