#infrastructure

The industry is spending 2.59 trillion dollars a year to etch gen-AI into physical silicon, on the bet that this paradigm is the durable one. The paying base is about 50 million people, the productivity that would pay for it isn't measurable, and no software paradigm has ever been the forever thing.

Kafka was never built to be queried. Apache Fluss bolts a columnar, Arrow-native hot store onto the streaming layer and tiers cold to Iceberg — a clean full-stack realtime design whose only real open question is governance.

A project survives not when its company thrives but when its community can't be captured. The history — MySQL, Redis, Terraform, OpenOffice — says the right to fork is the load-bearing property that keeps open source alive.

"Catalog" means two different things in the lakehouse: the technical catalog in your query path (Unity, Polaris) and the governance catalog beside it (OpenMetadata, DataHub). The second is where lineage, ownership, and trust live — and where the next fight is.

Most companies' data is not big enough to justify a distributed warehouse. A single fat box running DuckDB reads Parquet and Iceberg off S3 directly and answers the median analytics query in under a second, for a fixed bill and no cold start. The big-data era was mostly oversizing.

Iceberg did not win on features. Delta Lake had the bigger installed base and Hudi had the better write path. Iceberg won on governance and an engine-neutral spec, and the moment Databricks paid roughly $2B for Tabular the war was effectively over.

"Zero-ETL" is the data industry's most successful rebrand of the year — and the T never went anywhere. The transformation work does not vanish, it relocates to query time or to the catalog. What is genuinely new is the collapse in data duplication, and that part is worth the hype.

The cloud was a network-diagram icon for two decades before it was a product. Compaq coined cloud computing in 1996, AWS made it real in 2006, and the surrounding vocabulary — VPS, hyperscaler, colocation — each carries its own history.