Network World has published an article on Gartner's Top 10 Technologies for 2008. I love predictions although I will admit that October is a bit early. But why not get yours out early and beat the holiday rush, right? Actually as predictions go these are not bad. Like most, they range from the obvious to the "as-if" but it's risky to stick your neck out and we shouldn't be harsh with any organization that does. I do have a few comments on the predictions though.
Starting off in the #1 spot is green computing. I think they are right, especially for large organizations. It's no surprise to anybody trying to run a large data center that power is now the constraining resource. Unfortunately, the message is that green computing is a hardware problem. They also fall short of tying #5, virtualization, to the challenges of green computing. But if we get people to use virtualization to drive up utilization without realizing it's also saving power, I'm okay.
I'm a bit more dubious about #2. Not that I wouldn't love to have some unification of my communication world, but for me it seems my communications are diverging, not converging. I have far too many mailboxes, phone numbers, and calendars now. Every social network a friend joins just brings another communication channel for me to manage. At some point we may all cry "Uncle!" but right now it feels like we are moving in any direction but unified communications.
The next one that captured my attention was #4, meta data. This is definitely a problem that needs more attention. It is usually left as an afterthought to the overall architecture and yet any system of scale is virtually unusable without a good meta data system, designed in, not added on. I couldn't agree more that this needs to become serious focus in the year to come.
Virtualization is #5 on their list. Personally I'd move this higher. Abstracting deployments from physical instances is incredibly powerful. It is the next step in the logical progression of abstractions (machine language, high level language, virtual machines, and now virtual OS containers). Fortunately there is little for application developers to do on this one but if you aren't designing your applications to live happily inside a virtual container, start now.
It is interesting that the broke out their definition of computing fabrics into a separate item, #8. If my execution platform is sufficiently abstract, then a logical extension is that the hardware platform will be able to gain flexibility in how it allocates physical resources like processors and memory across boundaries within blades. The more interesting fabric to me is a better abstraction of systems like Beowulf so programming becomes more practical. There are an increasing number of social problems that scale far beyond the confines of one system but also don't split will due to the network nature of the data. Environments that let mere mortals program to loosely coupled clusters would help tremendously.
As always with predictions, it's fun to have a look back at the end of the year and see what you got right and what went far astray. I'm sure 2008 will follow several of these trends but will also bring us some interesting surprises. Feel free to share your predictions with comments!
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Can you elaborate why metadata becomes critical for applications of scale?
Posted by: Noah Campbell | Monday, October 15, 2007 at 12:01 AM
You are entitled to your own opinions.
Posted by: gubbay | Monday, October 15, 2007 at 06:55 AM
Perhaps I should have stated that metadata management becomes critical for applications of scale. If you consider the configuration data involved in any reasonably complex application and the take the cross product of managing that with a large number of nodes, it becomes a formidable problem by itself.
Posted by: Dan Pritchett | Monday, October 15, 2007 at 08:22 AM