ZeroMQ

Chapter 8. A Framework for Distributed Computing

We’ve gone though a journey of understanding ØMQ in its many aspects. By now you may have started to build your own products using the techniques I’ve explained, as well as others you’ve figured out yourself. You will start to face questions about how to make these products work in the real world.

But what is that “real world”? I’ll argue that it is becoming a world of ever-increasing numbers of moving pieces. Some people use the phrase “the Internet of Things,” suggesting that we’ll soon see a new category of devices that are more numerous, but also more stupid than our current smartphones, tablets, laptops, and servers. However, I don’t think the data points this way at all. Yes, there are more and more devices, but they’re not stupid at all. They’re smart and powerful, and getting more so all the time.

The mechanism at work is something I call “cost gravity,” and it has the effect of reducing the cost of technology by half every 18–24 months. Put another way, our global computing capacity doubles every two years, over and over and over. The future is filled with trillions of devices that are fully powerful multicore computers: they don’t run a cut-down “operating system for things,” but full operating systems and full applications.

And this is the world at which we’re aiming with ØMQ. When we talk of “scale,” we don’t mean hundreds of computers, or even thousands. Think of clouds of tiny, smart, and perhaps self-replicating machines ...