In “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn introduced the concept of a paradigm shift, which he used to describe a fundamental change in the basic framework of thinking in natural sciences. Throughout history, however, such paradigm shifts have occurred not just in natural sciences but across the entire spectrum of human endeavor, providing solutions to problems that appeared to be insurmountable under the old paradigm.
The field of data storage and computation is a case in point. As the demand for creation, retention, and data computation only ever increased with time, the current computing paradigm requires enterprises to build data continuously centers the size of football fields and nuclear power plants to power them. Here, the lack of resources and capabilities to build these things quickly enough indefinitely is not as important as the fact that the current computing paradigm is not compatible with a scalable solution.
