This is an excerpt from my article Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing in the Ambient Cloud.

We tend to think compute of resources as residing primarily in datacenters. Given the fast pace of innovation we will likely see compute resources become pervasive. Some will reside in datacenters, but compute resources can be anywhere, not just in the datacenter, we'll actually see the bulk of compute resources live outside of datacenters in the future.

Given the diversity of compute resources it's reasonable to assume they won't be homogeneous or conform to a standard API. They will specialize by service. Programmers will have to use those specialized service interfaces to build applications that are adaptive enough to take advantage of whatever leverage they can find, whenever and wherever they can find it. Once found the application will have to reorganize on the fly to use whatever new resources it has found and let go of whatever resources it doesn't have access to anymore.

If, for example, high security is required for a certain operation then that computation will need to flow to a specialized security cloud. If memory has gone on auction and a good deal was negotiated then the software will have to adapt to take advantage. If the application has a large computation it needs to carry out then it will need to find and make use of the cheapest CPU units it can find at that time. If the latency on certain network routes has reached a threshold the the application must reconfigure itself to use a more reliable, lower latency setup. If a new cheap storage cloud has come on line then the calculation will need to be made if it's worth redirecting new storage to that site. If a new calendar service offers an advantage then move over to that. If a new Smart Meter service promises to be a little smarter then go with the higher IQ. If a new Personal Car Navigation Service offers better, safer routes for less money then redirect. And so on.

In short, it's a market driven approach, mediated by service APIs, controlled by applications. Currently this is not how the world works at all. Currently applications resemble a top down hierarchically driven economy. Applications are built for a specific environment: platform, infrastructure, network, APIs, management, upgrade, job scheduling, queuing, backup, high availability, monitoring, billing, etc. Moving an application outside that relatively fixed relationship is very difficult and rarely done. For that reason talking about more fluid applications may seem a bit like crazy talk.