If you’re like me, you travel a fair amount for work, and that means you spend time sitting in airport concourses waiting for your flight, waiting for your flight to be rescheduled, and waiting for information on alternate flights when your flight is cancelled. Bottom line: There’s a lot of latency built into airline travel. My airport waiting time has led me to think about how these experiences relate to what I know about the infrastructure in my line of work: It’s urgent that the infrastructure is constantly evolving.
The airport system in the U.S. today is largely based on a hub-and-spoke model that seeks efficiency for airlines and for the overall travelling public by using centralized hubs that connect to a large number of “spoke” cities. In many ways, that is exactly how the internet is designed today: Large centralized data centers are the core of the cloud, and data and services are delivered to their destinations from these hubs. Yes, there are a lot of efficiencies to this centralized model (in terms of the cost, since many of these large data centers are in remote locations where power is cheap), but there are some big inefficiencies to this centralized model as well.