Well okay maybe not your life, because let’s face it, you are probably a well paid programmer living in the developed world. But watching the stories of the earthquake in Sumatra and the tsunami in Samoa over the last few days got me thinking that cloud computing could be a real life saver in these situations. How so? Well, did you know that an estimated $6.2 billion of donated medical supplies and 96 billion pounds of food never make it to the people who need them each year, simply because the technology and skills required for effective distribution are not available?
All the experts will tell you that the faster you get medical supplies and general “aid” to the disaster stricken regions then the more lives you can save. There will also be disaster relief plans set up ready to be put into action at a moment’s notice. These plans, I’m sure, are very detailed and cover every foreseeable eventuality. Of course, any soldier will tell you that it doesn’t matter how good your planning is, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The enemy in this case is going to be the disaster itself. As soon as relief workers arrive on the scene, “the plan” is going to have to be changed to fit the particular needs of the survivors. Systems are going to have to be in place to handle things like causality bureaux, missing persons, food/water distribution and other general logistical requirements. All this information is going to have to be fed back to HQ so that “the plan” can be amended as required.
All of this is perfectly obvious. The trouble is that… well the place is a disaster area, right? That’s why the relief workers are there in the first place. That causes two problems. Firstly, the lack of power on scene to run these systems and two, the relief agencies would have to ship all this kit out to the location, when what they really need to be doing is shipping food/medicine/rescue equipment etc. This is where cloud computing comes in. With all of the databases and “heavy computing” being abstracted out to the cloud, it now becomes possible for the relief workers to use much smaller computers – perhaps even PDAs which they can fit in their pockets, or in their back packs.
Now there isn’t likely to be any power on scene, but that is not an issue as they will be shipping generators anyway to power the lights and other rescue equipment so that’s okay. The other issue of course is connectivity, a cloud based solution is no use if you can’t connect to it. There are ways to overcome this problem however. If there are 3G towers in the area, and they have survived, then you can use products like this one to connect to them without a hotspot. If there is no network left then you can use a portable satellite solution, these things are not particularly big or heavy to ship.
Taking things a step further, instead of shipping the computers, wouldn’t it be cool if they could just ship the software instead? Well there is no reason why they couldn’t do that too. All they’d have to do is to write these systems for Linux – using Mono for example – then spin a LiveCD version of Linux, including the client systems. These respins could be loaded onto CD or USB sticks and carried to the scene in the pockets of rescue workers. Once on scene, they’d need to find a building with power and connectivity, but if they could – or if they knew of such a building before they left – they could just plug in the usb sticks, power up the machines and away they’d go. Once they were finished, just power down the machines again and then it’s as if they’d never been there.
Okay, so I’m sure there are lots of little niggly issues around my great plan, but I’m sure they could be resolved if enough thought was put to them. People are realising that software is required at the scene of these disasters. After hurricane Katrina the Department of Homeland Security recommended that a Chief Logistics Officer be appointed. Part of his remit is to procure software of this kind and a cloud based solution would appear, to me, to be the obvious one. What do you think?