The world has changed. And some things that should not have been forgotten, were lost. I found these words from the Lord of the Rings echoing in my head as I listened to a fascinating presentation by Luiz André Barroso, Distinguished Engineer at Google, concerning Google's legendary past, golden present, and apocryphal future. His talk, Warehouse-Scale Computing: Entering the Teenage Decade, was given at the Federated Computing Research Conference. Luiz clearly knows his stuff and was early at Google, so he has a deep and penetrating perspective on the technology. There's much to learn from, think about, and build.

Lord of the Rings applies at two levels. At the change level, Middle Earth went through three ages. While listening to Luiz talk, it seems so has Google: Batch (indexes calculated every month), Warehouse (the datacenter is the computer), and Instant (make it all real-time). At the "what was forgot" level, in the Instant Age section of the talk,  a common theme was the challenge of making low latency systems on top of commodity systems. These are issues very common in the real-time area and it struck me that these were the things that should not have been forgotten.

What is completely new, however, is the combining of Warehouse + Instant, and that's where the opportunities and the future is to be found- the Fourth Age.

The First Age - The Age of Batch