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> something like BGP that would've replaced their ARP setup Just a guess, but anecdotally it seems to me that inside a modern mid-size dev org there are a lot

> something like BGP that would've replaced their ARP setup Just a guess, but anecdotally it seems to me that inside a modern mid-size dev org there are a lot more engineers familiar with K/V stores like etcd/consul/ZK than IP routing protocols like OSPF and BGP. It's not necessarily the wrong decision to forgo an existing well-tested tool in favour of a hand-rolled solution, if you don't have any experts on that existing tool in your org.

mschuster91 8y ago
> It's not necessarily the wrong decision to forgo an existing well-tested tool in favour of a hand-rolled solution, if you don't have any experts on that existing tool in your org. It will, however, lead to other problems, especially: - reinvention of the wheel (aka: time waste) - starting from scratch: technologies like OSPF, BGP, or (when we're at higher levels) my/pgSQL vs noSQL are sometimes decades old and battle tested. Which means that there are a lot more edge cases that have been discovered and fixed/documented, as well as best practices that have evolved. Same goes for security. Or even fundamental stuff like ACID criteria (which many of the noSQL friends have had to re-discover and learn)... There's a reason yuge enterprises and government offices still run on mainframes (or, mainframe software on modern hardware): the stability and resilience of these beasts with uptimes in year-scales is something the hipster crap crowd is enviously looking at. And there's a reason that redesign projects in these areas fail so spectacularly: there are decades worth of domain knowledge and experience encoded in these systems. It's impossible to recreate this in a year or two, especially when outsourcing the work to body shops. Only thing I wonder is: it should be, by now, common knowledge (or: state of the art) that outsourcing yuge projects to body shops, especially foreign ones, leads to disasters. So why are managers and politicians not prosecuted or otherwise held responsible when screw-ups originate? After all, when one e.g. designs a building that violates fire code and people die as a result, or one grossly ignores security best practices, the responsible persons can get charged, too...
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  > my/pgSQL vs noSQL are sometimes decades old and battle tested > run on mainframes (or, mainframe software on modern hardware): the stability and resilience of these beasts with uptimes in year-scales is something the hipster crap crowd is enviously looking at Why so much ignorance? Distributed systems are not hipster things, it's an actual science that helps to understand why no amount of battle testing can make this old tech resilient, it's fundamentally broken. There is just no resilience without at least proper distributed algorithms.

mschuster91 8y ago

> It's not necessarily the wrong decision to forgo an existing well-tested tool in favour of a hand-rolled solution, if you don't have any experts on that existing tool in your org. It will, however, lead to other problems, especially: - reinvention of the wheel (aka: time waste) - starting from scratch: technologies like OSPF, BGP, or (when we're at higher levels) my/pgSQL vs noSQL are sometimes decades old and battle tested. Which means that there are a lot more edge cases that have been discovered and fixed/documented, as well as best practices that have evolved. Same goes for security. Or even fundamental stuff like ACID criteria (which many of the noSQL friends have had to re-discover and learn)... There's a reason yuge enterprises and government offices still run on mainframes (or, mainframe software on modern hardware): the stability and resilience of these beasts with uptimes in year-scales is something the hipster crap crowd is enviously looking at. And there's a reason that redesign projects in these areas fail so spectacularly: there are decades worth of domain knowledge and experience encoded in these systems. It's impossible to recreate this in a year or two, especially when outsourcing the work to body shops. Only thing I wonder is: it should be, by now, common knowledge (or: state of the art) that outsourcing yuge projects to body shops, especially foreign ones, leads to disasters. So why are managers and politicians not prosecuted or otherwise held responsible when screw-ups originate? After all, when one e.g. designs a building that violates fire code and people die as a result, or one grossly ignores security best practices, the responsible persons can get charged, too...

zzzcpan 8y ago
> my/pgSQL vs noSQL are sometimes decades old and battle tested > run on mainframes (or, mainframe software on modern hardware): the stability and resilience of these beasts with uptimes in year-scales is something the hipster crap crowd is enviously looking at Why so much ignorance? Distributed systems are not hipster things, it's an actual science that helps to understand why no amount of battle testing can make this old tech resilient, it's fundamentally broken. There is just no resilience without at least proper distributed algorithms.