Gravity is pulling us to the cloud

More precisely - data gravity.

Why data wants to be together? The answer is: Von Newmann Bottleneck and data gravity.

Von Newmann Bottleneck is a basic limitation on how fast computers can be. Essentially, it says that the speed with which information can get from memory (where data is stored) to computing (where data is acted upon) is the limiting factor in computing speed.

On a certain level, it doesn't matter how much data we've got the access to and how sophisticated systems we use - if both are not in the same "place".

Dave McCrory - a cloud technologist, who got some sense of the size of the upcoming digital transformation at the time when few people realized it - came up with the idea that Newton’s foundational law could be applied to more than physical objects.

He called it data gravity.

McCrory adapted the formula for universal gravitation to fit the concepts of data gravity:

Let's put it simply: data, applications, and services all have their own gravitational pull but data is Hulk Hogan in this arena and therefore has the most gravitational pull.

Why are latency and throughput important when thinking about your analytics?

Latency and throughput are the underlying drivers of data gravity. Unlike Newton’s apple, data doesn’t have physical mass to draw in surrounding objects. Instead, latency and throughput act as accelerants to the analytics process. Applied to analytics, latency is the wait time between your query traveling from the software application to the database, and then back to again. In the same example, throughput is the number of times your software application can query the database in a given amount of time.

Data is only useful when people can use it to answer their questions. To have that kind of impact, you’ll need to access the data in order to dive in. Queries that take hours or days break that analytical flow and get in the way of getting questions answered. Decreasing latency and increasing throughput returns your queries faster, allowing you to get to your analysis and answers faster. While there are many variables that can determine your system’s latency and throughput, the constant is location. When entities - data, applications, or services - are closer to one another, latency is lower and throughput higher. Based on this concept, data will exert a gravitational pull on the applications and services it fuels. In the quest for speed, the location of data will be an important factor when determining the location of the applications used to collect, store, and analyze it.

The apple fell on Newton’s head because the Earth has more mass than the apple, thereby pulling the apple closer via the phenomena we know as gravity. In the same way, data pulls other technologies toward it, software applications and services included. The natural home for data is the Cloud.