What about a programming language that integrates fancy cogs so they're conceptually in process? Do I want to know the difference between sorting in the native data-structure and Redis? Hopefully not, the language/compiler could make that call.
Programmer could specify how much data he's sorting, how fast he needs it sorted, how much data he'll get after each sort and the language will decide which cog to use for best performance. You don't need to know what Redis, Riak, or native data-structures are.
But the question was: can I afford to go through a tcp socket (and that's a long way, possibly even to another machine) or not. A language cannot cover this up.
Yes they're probably libraries, but in the language of the future that covers everything up you wouldn't know such distinctions.
Why can't a lib/lang cover it up? You tell it how much data will be stored and transferred. It will benchmark various approaches, having separate DB nodes or not, determine how many users each setup can support. The developer would need to be aware that 5000 users can fit into a $10 per month box. When he wants more users, he gets more boxes. If he wants more users per box he must cut expensive features.
Amazon DynamoDB does something along those lines by asking the dev to specify how much data to store and how many transfers to expect. The details of setting up nodes, how many nodes, how they're sharded, hashed, are hidden.
It's not that smart for these cases. No AI required. Run the app with various cogs, benchmark each run, pick the cog than ran fastest. Compiling for cog picks will take more time. The programmer would be responsible for sending the right dummy data by linking to a data gen cog and writing tests.
Cogs come with lots of metadata for use cases, performance profiles, data sizes, etc. They don't need to be marketed, tried by hundreds of hopeful devs and become resume buzzwords. The programmer no longer needs to read HN and care about the shiniest new cogs. Mental overhead is greatly reduced.
Programmer could specify how much data he's sorting, how fast he needs it sorted, how much data he'll get after each sort and the language will decide which cog to use for best performance. You don't need to know what Redis, Riak, or native data-structures are.