Commodity, Speed of Light, EAB

This post was actually going to be about technology commodity. I actually even wrote a part of it. I had all kinds of things in there - a definition of the word commodity from the wikipedia, a reference to Karl Marx, processing grid, service grid, data grid, etc... It was going to be a pretty good post before I erased it.

What the hell? Well, I had no point, I was just writing the obvious. Let me start over. Any enterprise architecture is going to be distributed, but that's not enough. Systems need to communicate and share data. Some systems may provide a service to other systems. Some systems may be in-charge of routing messages. Other systems may be in charge of doing calculations, other systems provide auxiliary services like calendar, or caching. The point is that a whole lot of systems are going to be communicating. In fact, in some cases, that communication will be very heavy and may become a liability. An Enterprise Architecture Bottleneck(EAB). You gotta love acronyms. They make everything sound so much more impressive.

In order to reduce EAB, your system will need to reduce the amount of data being transferred, figure out a faster transfer method, go faster than the speed of light, or all of the above. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume the last point is currently not feasible. For the second item, you can buy a bigger pipe, but you are still stuck to a certain latency. The cost to transfer a bit from NY to London will always be bound to the speed of light. So, can the system reduce the amount transferred. I think it's possible if the system is aware of the data patterns and can remove any unnecessary or redundant information. For example, let's say me and you are carrying a conversation. Certain things are obvious, other things can be deduced by you without me saying anything. For other things, I may only need to say a few things for you to understand much more, and in other cases, you may already know certain things, because I've already mentioned them. What does this all mean? The sending system will need to analize the data stream and learn to reduce the load. Of course, this assumes that the sender and receiver have agreed on some transfer protocol.

Well, this post is still pretty obvious, but maybe a bit more interesting than another tirade on processing grids.