Realizing the Global Edge Cloud

The recent trend toward application hosting in large data centers should and will be counterbalanced by a ubiquitous edge cloud with deeply programmable networking. The Internet to date has been dominated by sending data to programs and people; the next Internet will be dominated by managing data and the connections to people generating and needing the data. In this article, we describe why the Internet is on the cusp of this transition, two prototypes of this next Internet, PlanetLab [1] and the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) [2], and the architectural concepts that emerge from them. We describe the next step: the viral stage, GENI-as-a- Service.