About 10 years ago, the biggest buzz in the IT industry was the term big data. Every major enterprise was racing to harness the mystical powers of massive, yet supposedly manageable, silos of data. Equipped with big data, no problem would prove insurmountable, and all forecasts would be met.
But lately, these forecasts appear to have faded, and the worst-kept secret in the IT industry is that big data is dead – at least as we knew it. This doesn't mean that the volume or growth of data has broken down – or the opposite. It's just the underlying technology that has changed, which means that the architectures of applications that use big data have too.
Take Hadoop as an example, which has been the icon of the big data hype. It was designed based on a set of assumptions that dramatically changed in a short time. One of...