FIPFO - First In Probably First Out

The FIFO (First In First Out) is a very well known concept in computer science. In one of my previous post, I used the word FIPFO to refer to First In Probably First Out to refer to the cloud equivalent of the FIFO.

Indeed, the basic idea behind that term is that you can’t scale much pure FIFOs due to synchronization constraints. Yet, if you just loosen a little bit the semantic, that is to say, FIPFO, then you have an infinitely scalable data structure.

Considering its simplicity and usefulness, I believe that FIFPO will be ubiquitous in future cloud computing applications.

Matthieu, a colleague at Lokad, was asking me if FIPFO was a well-known concept or yet another wacky term that I had just made-up on my blog. Well, sorry, I can’t really remember. FIPFO seems just to be a very appropriate way to describe data structure such as the Windows Azure Queue, but I am not sure if I read about it elsewhere now.

According to Google, there is just a single other result at the time for FIPFO by another person who came up with this term a few days before my initial post while describing the Drupal API. Yet, I had never read the Drupal forums before, so I guess we did separately end up with the same idea and terminology.