As I said in the other comment, maybe people though that "cloud computing" is a different paradigm back in the 70's but it turns out that no, it's all the same distributed stuff.
If you have two processes on same machine, locking a shared data structure takes microseconds. You can easily update hundreds of shared maps and still provide great performance to user.
If you have datacenters in NY and Frankfurt, the ping is 90mS and fundamental speed of light limit say it will never be below 40mS.
So "lock a shared data structure" is completely out of the question, you need a different consistency model, remote-aware algorithms, local caches, and so on.
There are people who are continuously trying to replace Unix with completely new paradigms, like Unison [0].. but it is not really catching up, and I don't think it ever will. Physics is tough.
If you have two processes on same machine, locking a shared data structure takes microseconds. You can easily update hundreds of shared maps and still provide great performance to user.
If you have datacenters in NY and Frankfurt, the ping is 90mS and fundamental speed of light limit say it will never be below 40mS.
So "lock a shared data structure" is completely out of the question, you need a different consistency model, remote-aware algorithms, local caches, and so on.
There are people who are continuously trying to replace Unix with completely new paradigms, like Unison [0].. but it is not really catching up, and I don't think it ever will. Physics is tough.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652677