Preface

If you have worked in software engineering in recent years, especially in server-side and backend systems, you have probably been bombarded with a plethora of buzzwords relating to storage and processing of data. NoSQL! Big Data! Web-scale! Sharding! Eventual consistency! ACID! CAP theorem! Cloud services! MapReduce! Real-time!

In the last decade we have seen many interesting developments in databases, in distributed systems, and in the ways we build applications on top of them. There are various driving forces for these developments:

Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Twitter are handling huge volumes of data and traffic, forcing them to create new tools that enable them to efficiently handle such scale.

Businesses need to be agile, test hypotheses cheaply, and respond quickly to new market insights by keeping development cycles short and data models flexible.