The Log: Real-time data's unifying abstraction
The idea of the log goes well beyond just real-time data (as the blog post describes, although the title does not). I think it might well turn out to be one of core building blocks of _all_ stateful systems.  Amazon's Kinesis has for the first time exposed a reliable Log-aaS on the cloud; I think we'll start to see more systems built around it.<p>My personal "24 commits for December" project is to build a set of open-source cloud data-stores, all backed by a distributed log using Raft, "blogging all the way".  I'm half-way through, and I've implemented a simple key-value store, put a Redis front-end on it, used that to implement a Git server, and am currently working on building a document store with SQL querying.  All with the same architecture: the log provides fault-tolerance and consistency, we have a data structure specific to the particular service (e.g. message queue or key-value store), we periodically take state snapshots so that we don't have to reply the whole log after every failure.<p>Feel free to follow along / provide feedback: <a href="http://blog.justinsb.com/blog/categories/cloudata/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.justinsb.com/blog/categories/cloudata/</a>