Data-aware infrastructure: It’s about time!
2015 has been my year of nonstop ranting about the need for us to get out of the IT Stone Age and into the 19th century. Dumb infrastructure will be our demise.
But it’s not too late. There are signs of life starting to appear. All hope is not lost.
A highway is dumb infrastructure. It’s great — it lets us humans make decisions and plot a course to take us where we want to go. Point A to Point B, pull over to relieve ourselves at Rest Stop 6, then continue on to our destination via Point C. If we didn’t have that dumb infrastructure, getting where we want to go would be horrifically difficult.
A luggage conveyor system at an airport is smart infrastructure. Our bag doesn’t have to make decisions. It has a destination encoded on it, and the infrastructure makes all the decisions to optimize where it goes and how it gets there. Yes, I know that things still go horribly wrong — but 99.9% of the time, the system works.
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