Why is the valley crowd treating distributed systems engineering like it's a new fad? And why are they only using tech made in the past 5 years? The field has been around for four decades, yet they focus on only a couple algorithms and models?
There's certainly been a lot more interest lately in building distributed systems, and in certain models mostly related to databases. I think a lot of this has been pushed by a few companies with an interest in either pushing these fields forward or being known as experts. A good example might be Basho, who've generated a lot of buzz around the Ricon conferences and the Think Distributed podcast.
To be clear, I think this is a good thing. I personally think distributed systems are a really interesting topic, and a big swell in interest generates discussion and lots of interesting reading material. :) Granted it also generates a lot of faddishness and crap, but that's the price of any kind of wide interest in a topic.
And really, while there's some crap out there, a lot of it's actually really good. I've been enjoying aphyr's recent blogging about Jepsen, a lot of the recorded talks from Ricon West were really interesting, and there's been some good discussion on Twitter and lobste.rs related to these topics.
So sure, the valley might be treating this like a fad. They also do that with *.js and obscure editor plugins. :) But in this case I think that's not a bad thing.
Is that because your words are a little bit challenging?
I'm with you. Distributed Computing is not new, especially it's not only about a couple of algorithms. But looks like folks here are only familiar with the algorithms, such as the algorithms used by Google.
Actually Distributed Computing means a lot more than that. I'm going to write some blog about that, but not quite ready yet.
"Our Paxos implementation is closer to Raft algorithm than to what you'd read in Paxos paper which is… horrible."
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spanner-distributed-googl...