Like “API” Is “Storage Tier” Redefining itself?

There is an interesting bit in high-tech that isn’t much mentioned but happens pretty regularly – when a good idea is adapted and moved to new uses, raising it a bit in the stack or revising it to keep up with the times. The quintessential example of this phenomenon is the progression from “subroutines” to “libraries” to “frameworks” to “APIs” to “Web Services”. The progression is logical and useful, but those assembler and C programmers that were first stuffing things into reusable subroutines could not have foreseen the entire spectrum of what their “useful” idea was going to become over time. I had the luck of developing in all of  those stages. I wrote assembly routines right before they were no longer necessary for everyday development, and wrote web services/SOA routines for the first couple of years they were about.