The Grid is the Consequence of the Edge

Chetan Venkatesh, Co-Founder and CEO at Macrometa

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The OGA is heavily focused on reimagining the Internet. How do you envision the Internet evolving over the next 10 years?

Over the past ten years, the world has been moving toward using the cloud as a programmatic platform for creating web services. The challenge with that model is that we've inherited the centralized aspects of the cloud, the good, the bad, and the costs that go along with it. The next iteration of the Internet is going to be about the geo-distribution of those services, making things more efficient and real-time. 

The decentralization of the Internet is going to result in more geo-distributed architectures. The maturing of that new model ultimately means that these services will eventually come together as a grid, where real-time is the expectation, and data is everywhere. These are the kinds of edge, multi-cloud, and data questions we think about at Macrometa.

As a society, we’re built and heavily reliant on digital services. What are some of the new applications you see emerging, and how does the Internet need to evolve to meet those?

Location awareness and data privacy are going to be huge areas of focus. As more and more things become smarter, and ingest all kinds of data that needs to be analyzed, we’re going to need an edge and grid-like infrastructure to handle that volume of data – especially at cost points that make sense for broad adoption. After that, data privacy becomes an issue because, ultimately, a lot of that generated data is sensitive and you need sophisticated ways to handle it. Those are the emerging applications that aren’t ideal for the cloud paradigm, but better suited for the new edge cloud and grid paradigms.

Why push forward with the grid versus focusing solely on the edge? What role will the Grid play in 5-10 years, and how does the edge fit?

We can think of the grid as this sort of aggregation layer for different edge providers. It's a continuation of the edge, especially as we aggregate more and more edges. You’ll end up with this grid-like architecture that doesn’t skip edge computing – it’s a consequence of edge computing. A bunch of birds is a flock. The grid is like that.

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What industries do you think will benefit most from the Grid, and why are they important for a better tomorrow?

It’s pretty much known that AI/Machine Learning is going to play a role in every industry we know. You need a fluid infrastructure that can supply AI and ML with that computation and storage power they need. And more broadly, we think everything that benefits from AI/Machine Learning will benefit from grid and edge computing.

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How does your company’s mission and services fit with the Open Grid Alliance? Why are you passionate about the Grid?

We like to say that we give developers superpowers because we give them the tools to build these impossible apps. We’re always trying to push the boundaries, and the grid is another infrastructure for us to serve our customers through. We’re passionate about the same things our customers are passionate about. We want to keep re-defining what it means to be “impossible”.

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About Chetan Venkatesh, Co-Founder and CEO, Macrometa.

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Chetan Venkatesh is a technology startup veteran focused on distributed data, edge computing, and software products for enterprises and developers. He has 20 years of experience in building primary data storage, databases, and data replication products. Chetan holds a dozen patents in the area of distributed computing and data storage. 

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Chetan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Macrometa – a Global Data Network with integrated pub/sub, stream processing, search, functions, and containers. Macrometa lets enterprise developers build real-time apps and APIs in minutes – not months.

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