Back in 2003, in the 50th issue of the Journal of the ACM (JACM), Jim Gray of Microsoft Research published "What Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals" article. The article mentioned scalability as one of the long term research goals, and defined an example goal of scalability as follows:

"Devise a software and hardware architecture that scales up by a factor of 1 000 000.That is an application's storage and processing capacity can automatically grow by a factor of million; either doing jobs faster or doing jobs in the same time, by just adding more resources."

Right now, at the end of year 2008, we hear all the buzz words:Cloud, cloud computing, scalability which in most of the cases are new terms referring to the old things, it is important to note that these concepts were already there, but unused, uncovered or hidden in the academic environments. It is arguably not until Google came, these concepts have drawn the significant attention. And while Google was not a precursor in the scalability area, it is undeniably one of the most prominent participants as well as propagators of the related ideas with their huge data collection. The huge success of the model employed at Google made people realize how important and useful ability being able to scale is. After all, it was not until the Google File System, BigTable, MapReduce, WorkQueue, Sawzall, which are collectively now known as the Google Stack, saw the daylight.

In the next posts I will reveal the nature of the Google Stack and will bring you closer to the related concepts.