EDITOR’S QUESTION
HOW IMPORTANT
IS DEVELOPING
A FLEXIBLE AND
MOBILE WORKFORCE
IN TODAY’S DIGITAL
ENVIRONMENT?
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M
adhukar Kumar, Head of
Developer Advocacy, Redis Labs,
discusses the trends he believes
will put us squarely in the middle of a zero-
latency future. believe will together make this phenomenon
a reality. If a machine (hardware plus
software) starts interacting with humans or
other machines in less than a second, it is a
zero-latency device or app.
The tech industry regularly sees the rise
and fall of several hype cycles including
the advent of the dot com era to cloud
computing, Big Data and more recently,
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain. When you talk to Alexa or Google Home, the
devices often respond in less than a second,
but I think it could be even faster. Think about
autonomous vehicles, facial recognition,
smart homes etc., where everything needs
to come together to make a decision and
act based on hundreds of inputs in a few
milliseconds. Now imagine that kind of
computing is everywhere around you. That,
in my mind, is a zero-latency future. In this
future, any response time over one second will
be unacceptable. Let’s look at just a few of
the trends shaping this future:
Looking back, it’s clear that each one of
these major changes was additive or in some
way related to the disruption that happened
before. For example, AI would not be where
it is today without Big Data. Big Data would
not have been possible without the advent
of cloud computing and cloud itself would
be non-existent without the world wide web
boom in the 90s.
Armed with this hindsight, I believe we are
about to make technology’s next major
leap due to several forces coming together.
In a nutshell, I believe we are headed into
a zero-latency future. Now before you raise
an eyebrow, let’s define what that means
and then look at all the individual trends I
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INTELLIGENTCIO
1. Quantum computing: Although we
probably won’t see an immediate
replacement of classic computers in the
next year, IBM has already opened up
a playground where people can start
experimenting with this new technology.
These developments are going to fast-
track opportunities for exponentially
faster compute processing power
2. 5G Internet: The first 5G networks are
expected to go live in Britain this year,
making it possible to download – not
merely stream – a full HD movie in less
than 10 seconds using a 5G network
3. Persistent memory: Intel recently
announced the launch of Optane DC
persistent memory, which looks like any
standard RAM but can store terabytes
and even persist data when power
is switched off. With this increased
capacity, vast amounts of data can be
processed in real time and persisted
without ever touching a disk
4. Real-time data processing at the edge:
A lot more data processing will happen
in real time at the edge (i.e. in devices
for autonomous cars, Smart Cities, facial
recognition, wearable tech and more)
5. Data processing within compute: In
traditional Big Data implementations,
we saw programming logic move to the
data (think MapReduce and Hadoop).
Now, I expect we’ll begin to see the
reverse. Data and more importantly data
types will be pulled into compute for
near-zero latency processing because
any latency from seeking data on a disk
will no longer be acceptable
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