On infrastructures and applications
What do roads & cars, the electricity grid & TVs, the Internet & Facebook all have in common?
For a while already an observation would linger, deep inside me, and I was not able to put a finger on it, was not able to express it properly. Then, some time ago I stumbled upon a blog post by Merv Adrian where he says:
The fact is, there is an entire industry building products atop Apache open source code … The license permits such use, and companies using the Apache web server, Lucene and SOLR, Cassandra and CouchDB, and many others are everywhere. … Having some components of your solution stack provided by the open source community is a fact of life and a benefit for all. So are roads, but nobody accuses Fedex or your pizza delivery guy of being evil for using them without contributing some asphalt.
Indeed. There it was: infrastructure and applications.
Coming back to the second-level heading: roads are infrastructure, cars are one sort of applications. The electricity grid is infrastructure and TV is one of its applications. And of course FB is an Internet/Web application. So, why bother, you ask? It’s so obvious, isn’t it?
Well, that depends on the point of view and if you appreciate the implications: without infrastructure, no applications. But, without the incentive and/or prospect of applications, who bothers building infrastructure? This is a typical chicken-egg problem. And this negative cycle can only be exited if one side (or both?) make a move without waiting for or expecting something from the other.
From my point of view, in the world I live—the Hadoop and NoSQL eco-system—applications are pivotal, as the things we provide are really just infrastructure. In my previous (work) life I’ve experienced a similar issue in the Open Data realm, where the lack of applications is a serious threat to the overall success.
Now, luckily, in the Big Data realm, it’s not exactly a lack of applications per se I seem to see but more a lack of focused usage scenarios. Scenarios where a clear & measurable—business-defined—goal can be identified and the value of the infrastructure can be made explicit.
Next time you are developing and deploying a system, ask yourself, am I doing infrastructure or application, and if I’m doing the one, who’s doing the other? Not that the one is more important than the other. It’s really about appreciating that they are yin and yang. Can’t have the one without the other.
