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Preface

There many been many developments in distributed systems, databases and the applications build on top of them, there are various driving forces:

  1. Handling huge volumes of data.
  2. Businesses need to be agile, test hypotheses cheaply and respond quickly to markets.
  3. Free & open source software has become very successful and is preferred now to commercial or in-house solutions
  4. CPU clock speeds are barely increasing. But multi-core processors are standard and networks are getting faster. Parallelism is only going to increase.
  5. Even small teams can now build systems that are distributed across machines and regions - thanks to IaaS (think AWS)
  6. Many services are expected to be highly available. Extended downtime is unacceptable.

An application is data-intensive if data is it's primary challenge.

  • The quantity of data.
  • The complexity of data.
  • The speed at which data changes.

This is opposed to compute-intensive where the CPU is the bottle neck.