This is a guest post by Siddharth Anand, a senior member of LinkedIn's Distributed Data Systems team.
Preamble Ramble
If you’ve been working in the online (e.g. internet) space over the past 3 years, you are no stranger to terms like “the cloud” and “NoSQL”.
In 2007, Amazon published a paper on Dynamo. The paper detailed how Dynamo, employing a collection of techniques to solve several problems in fault-tolerance, provided a resilient solution to the on-line shopping cart problem. A few years go by while engineers at AWS toil in relative obscurity at standing up their public cloud.
It’s December 2008 and I am a member of Netflix’s Software Infrastructure team. We’ve just been told that there is something called the “CAP theorem” and because of it, we are to abandon our datacenter in hopes of leveraging Cloud Computing.
Huh?
