In 2004, when the Google MapReduce paper was written, it would have been very common for a data workload to not fit on a single commodity machine. [âŚ] Today, however, a standard instance on AWS uses a physical server with 64 cores and 256 GB of RAM. Thatâs two orders of magnitude more RAM. [âŚ]
One definition of âBig Dataâ is âwhatever doesnât fit on a single machine. By that definition, the number of workloads that qualify has been decreasing every year.
On a separate note, itâs a lot of fun to debug memory leaks in 256 GB RAM machines.