Scalability (next generation #4)

Every business is looking to reach its’ goals. What is amazing is that organizations are infested with people that look to the business as it is today as opposed to what it should be tomorrow. Yes, this could be a rehearsal of disruption vs incrementalism, but it’s a bit narrower than that, as it will focus on Scalability.

Scalability refers to the ability of a system, network, or process to handle more work or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. In technology, that can be the ability to handle increasing amounts of data, users, or transactions without sacrificing performance or reliability. That can be achieved through various means such as adding more resources (such as servers or storage), optimizing algorithms, or employing distributed systems architecture. Scalability is crucial for ensuring that systems can accommodate growth efficiently without significant increases in cost or degradation in performance.

Reached here, some might be frustrated as they always think of their Systems as a limited, expensive resource, that might change, but always later and maybe. That is real and the natural consequence of Systems being developed and administered as such, i.e. limited expensive resources. That’s not the case in the “next generation”.

The Cloud provides a virtual infinite pool of resources. One can provide any organization with the simplest or most powerful devices or applications, at zero investment, on a pay-per-use basis. In minutes! So why is anyone working as the supermarket shelves are empty?

The Web provides a virtual infinite platform. That is the pinnacle of Digital - anyone, anywhere, anytime. One can have a new system available at any device, for anyone to use anywhere, anytime, independently of how big the organization is. In minutes, hours or days, depending on the system, but always at once, not too often, too late.

Then Collaboration provides the means to scale. Either starting with the simple video conferencing apps that bring whoever together in seconds or proceeding with the sharing and simultaneous usage of every kind of tool, from word processing to source control.

And finally, Distributed Applications rule the world. There’s nothing else than distributed, orchestrated applications. The rest is the old generation of isolated islands from monolithic vendors that give the comfort of being with the pack, as opposed to being alone, well, the grassroots of every religion. But, coming back to Science, distributed applications is not only the obvious choice as it is the one that is related to Scalability, per definition.

Cloud, Web, Collaboration and Distributed Applications. That’s the recipe. Not local, isolated, proprietary, dividing, closed, scale-in applications. In one word, broken applications.

Yes, we can put all the eggs in one basket and cry for security. Or we can have all the eggs in all the baskets we need and make omelettes.

The challenge of Scalability is solved for the “next generation”. But the talk of eggs just made me hungry, it’s lunch time and that’s something I want to do as I always did.

If you’re catching up with the “next generation” series, here’s a recap: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/artificial-intelligence-revolution-next-generation-recap-ferreira-v8bpf