Distance has disappeared, either innovation or death.
—— Thomas Peters, American Management Master
With the development of the Internet, the development process of the Web has been marked as a label of the Internet era, just like Web 1.0: information and human communication have become the past tense; Web 2.0: everyone interacts, that is now; Web 3.0: everyone innovates, Is the future.
1. Web qualitative change era
The Web has different product focus at different stages. Let's use the products of the Web era to elaborate:
Web 1.0: The era of lack of original content. The presentation form of Web 1.0 is like early products such as eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and Google. The level of user consumption depends on the accumulation of content on the platform, that is, the exchange of people and information. In Web 1.0, there are few content creators and relatively lack of information, which can only achieve the role of information transmission. The vast majority of users are just consumers of content, and relatively little information needs to be stored.
Web History, Source: The Record of Knowledge and Action, 2020-04
Web 2.0: Massive growth of user data. The Web 2.0 era is the new Internet era, and its presentation carriers are Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, Douyin, and blogs. The characteristic of Web 2.0 is that people can communicate and share freely, allowing content data to show snowball accumulation.
Web 3.0 does not have a complete concept or a universal product. To quote Yahoo CEO Yang Zhiyuan, it can be summarized: "3.0 will be deepened, and it will be a true public carrier... The boundaries between professional, semi-professional and consumer are increasing. The more vague, it creates a network effect of business and applications". In summary, its characteristics are: cross-platform, cross-professional innovative interactive form for everyone. Its appearance may make users no longer fixed on a certain oligarchic product or professional skills, the concept of the enterprise will gradually become blurred, and the value of individuals will be demonstrated through "innovation".
So looking back, let’s look at the Web era. No matter which Internet era it is, data storage is inseparable, and the storage system is the carrier of all content. So what development has storage in the Web era experienced?
2. The status quo of Web 2.0 storage: drawbacks that are increasingly exposed
Ubiquitous storage
Storage technology is growing rapidly. At the beginning, there were three storage forms: disk, tape, and optical disk. With the rapid development of hardware and technology, the development of the storage industry also followed Moore's Law to iterate rapidly. At present, storage in the Web 2.0 era has developed to the stage of flash memory, cloud storage and enterprise-level storage servers, which greatly improves storage efficiency while reducing storage costs.
The increasing amount of data urgently needs the development of storage technology. The network characteristics of Web 2.0 enable everyone to share and produce content, driving the exponential growth of data.
However, due to insufficient storage methods at this stage, user information leaks are often seen: personal information of 20 million people in Taiwan has been leaked on the dark web; more than 200 million user information of China Telecom have been sold; more than 87 million information of Facebook has been leaked; UnderArmour 1.5 Hundreds of millions of users' daily diet, exercise data, bank card numbers and other information were leaked.
Generally speaking, the main problems of the current status of data storage are as follows:
Cloud storage configuration with frequent errors and omissions. Global encryption expert McAfee claims that "99% of cloud and IaaS misconfigurations are under the control of end users and still go unnoticed." Even some of the most common/well-known cloud database implementations did not regard security or risk as a standard at the beginning, and most of the accident responsibility was attributed to the user through the contract. The product only reached the storage function, and security was emphasized. Insufficiency leads to frequent errors and omissions.
Github information leak news, source: bleepingcomputer.com, 2020-05
Vulnerabilities in the code repository have gradually revealed themselves. In 2016, GitHub's million user information was suspected to be leaked from GeekedIn's MongoDB. In 2020, hackers claimed to have stolen more than 500GB of data from Microsoft's private GitHub repository. The intrusion of the code repository is difficult to detect in the anomaly detection system, and it may be too late if it happens.
Open source software that is vulnerable to intrusion. Developers often underestimate the risks during the development process. With the help of open source software, they can save time and money, but they also face the risk of insufficient system security. Once a security breach is exploited, both users and enterprises will suffer losses.
These vulnerabilities undoubtedly add a lot of work to the current work: monitoring external attack surfaces and exposure risks; maintaining software updates, implementing patch management and automatic patch updates; maintaining the latest complete list of public clouds, containers, code bases, and file sharing services.
All of the above problems are mainly attributed to underlying storage problems, because the imperfection of centralized storage has led to frequent vulnerabilities in applications and development based on the upper layer.
So how will Web 3.0 solve the storage problem?
3. Decentralized storage direction of Web 3.0
In the expectations of Web 3.0, many concepts will be blurred, and storage is no exception. IPFS is a Web 3.0 storage protocol designed to create a network transmission protocol for persistent and distributed storage and sharing of files. The goal of IPFS is to supplement or even replace the Hypertext Media Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used in the past 20 years, hoping to build a faster, safer and more free Internet era.
Solve the problem: In terms of cost, distributed storage attacks are very costly. In terms of security, HTTP is extremely vulnerable to DDoS attacks, but IPFS can avoid a single point of failure, it is difficult for hackers to attack, and files are not easy to leak; it does not rely on a backbone network, and a single node is not affected by a disaster without affecting the entire network. There are also backup files.
What are the application directions of IPFS storage?
IPFS is combined with blockchain. At present, most public chain data is stored based on centralized storage, and only the storage method is recorded on the chain. If decentralized applications want to develop into a truly decentralized, large-scale application, storage solutions based on the IPFS protocol can be used.
Combination of IPFS and blockchain, source: Protocol Lab, 2020
IPFS can also provide a distributed caching solution for traditional applications. The storage project built on the IPFS protocol can provide a distributed cache project for traditional applications, and store the associated searchable data in the IPFS network, which is uniquely identified by the IPFS network and distributed on each neighboring node .
IPFS itself is a network framework, and it is born a CDN. IPFS is a distributed Web, point-to-point hypermedia protocol, as the underlying framework; CDN is a content distribution network, and CDN can only be distributed based on the existing network. IPFS itself can connect idle resources for content distribution networks, which can be defined as a "new type" CDN.
The above are some of the underlying combination of IPFS, which is more macro. In the sea of stars in IPFS, every landing star can move a large area. The decentralized blockchain protocol of Web 3.0 will enable individuals to connect to the Internet and enable individuals to have time and data compensation, thus surpassing the current exploitative and unfair networks and replacing huge centralized repositories.
In the next part, we will detail some IPFS landing scenarios and how to leverage new business models