# 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.