Field Specialization and the Cloud: A Great Combination
Field specialization and cloud applications go well together, in four advantageous ways.
First, field specialization speeds up DBMSes and other data-intensive enterprise applications. This results in a more responsive cloud service, while reducing hardware provisioning costs. Both the cloud vendor and end users benefit. More efficient application also directly translate to lower energy consumption, thereby reducing operation cost.
Second, continuous specialization works especially well with cloud systems. Specializations can be deployed independently. The user experience is that their cloud applications just gets faster and faster, as more and more specialization are employed in their applications.
Third, open-source DBMSes can be challenging for cloud vendors to manage, because users want to rely on a specified release of the DBMS. However, field specialization preserves the semantics of the portion being specialized. This means that field specialization can speed up cloud-deployed open-source DBMSes in an manner that is entirely transparent to end users.
Finally, the cloud infrastructure often consists of machine farms with identical configurations in large quantities. The homogeneous nature of such an environment maximizes the reusability of the speccodes and can maximize the benefit of the specialization by tailoring the speccode to specific hardware configurations at a large scale.