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It's rather rare to see off the shelf technologies (open or closed) that scale to the top 5%. This makes sense because the techniques required at that level ar
by Diederich 10y ago
It's rather rare to see off the shelf technologies (open or closed) that scale to the top 5%. This makes sense because the techniques required at that level are pretty different, and don't apply well to other situations.
So, making an off the shelf product that actually does scale to the top 5% rarely makes sense, since, at best, the customer base will be limited. In the average case, though, the customer base will be almost nil, because of the per-site quirks and customization that are always present.
I experienced this on a weekly basis in the late 1990s and early 2000s at WalMart, where we were centrally managing a network with well over 10 million nodes.
Every vendor ever constantly tried to get in with us, so we had to come up with a triage system or an enormous portion of our time would be spent evaluating.
Even those best of breed would almost never work for us, because of our unprecedented scale (at the time).
In the rare case where an off the shelf product was selected and successful, it had to be heavily customized.
I am of course talking more about 'framework' kinds of tech, or, I guess, things that work at scale. A lot of off the shelf tech was and is used that isn't scale related.
- sofaofthedamned 10y agoFunny you should mention Walmart. I went to visit them in ~1992 when they were the biggest user of Teradata at the time. Never used Teradata after that, but i'm interviewing with them in the UK next week...
- Diederich 10y agoYup. WalMart was doing big data analytics, mixed in with a lot of real-time processing, many years before those became a thing in the rest of the industry. If you don't mind me asking, what kind of position are you looking at in the UK next week?
- sofaofthedamned 10y agoDevops. Yes Teradata were awesome at the time. Their secret sauce was the hashed index stuff,which I think was the source of their major patents. Our PM was not amused when I pointed out that, although hashed indexes were awesome, they did nothing when you were doing a wildcard search at which point you're doing a table space scan. Nobody has thought about this wrinkle...
- Diederich 10y agoDevops with WalMart in UK...so with ASDA then? Re: Teradata: I sat next to that group for half a year, but I had no other direct exposure to it. I did what one might call 'devops' for Network Engineering.
- sofaofthedamned 10y agoNo, this was for WH Smith. We went to Walmart to see how they used it. It was awesome, but misunderstood.