“If we are in a data revolution right now, the computational advance that made it possible was not the ‘discovery’ of Map-Reduce, but instead the realisation that these computing systems can and should be built from relatively cheap, shared-nothing machines (and the real contribution from Google in this area was arguably GFS, not Map-Reduce).”

I think people forget what it was like to be arguing for cheap, shared-nothing machines a decade ago. You were looked on as if you were mad. More than mad. Delusional. It was the talk of crackpots because everyone “knew” how you built “proper” systems. Except they didn’t. On the plus side I got to see what being thought of as a crackpot was like for a decade!