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Contributed article by Rahim Yaseen, Couchbase Senior Vice President, Product Development

Distributed and Clustered Systems Become the Natural Architecture for Applications in 2013

Looking to 2013 evokes an interesting question: Is the world inherently distributed or is it inherently centralized?

The response in most domains would be that the world is inherently distributed. In IT and systems, the answer would be it's a cycle where the pendulum swings both ways.

2013 is the year that we finally accept mainstream distributed and clustered systems as the natural architecture for Internet applications. The Internet is built on a fundamentally distributed architecture with no centralized points of control. Even DNS is distributed. The Internet powerhouses (Google, Amazon, others) singularly use distributed and clustered architectures as a foundation. By the way, so does nature.

Alas, we know that distributed systems are hard to build, so we end up taking the path of least resistance, starting with easy-to-build, easy-to-manage and easy-to-understand centralized systems. Over time, we realize that the centralization that made things fairly easy to build has slowly become a bottleneck for scaling.

For the proliferation of data on the Internet, the most natural fit for scaling and processing such data are clusters of distributed systems. This class of systems was previously exclusively the domain of large Internet powerhouses. Now, thanks in large part to the innovation of various open source NoSQL database technologies, these systems are starting to go mainstream and are being rapidly adopted by those that did not have prior access to such technology.

With these kinds of advances now available "for the rest of us," my prediction is that 2013 will be the year we embrace distributed and clustered systems with gusto!

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