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The Fallacies of Distributed Computing Reborn: The Cloud Era
- Yoric 16y agoOne point seems to be missing: web applications that do have a web front are actually distributed not only on the servers, but also on the clients. This makes reasoning on reliability or security even harder.
- stcredzero 16y agoA part of the solution: robust sync. Let's take the typical example of a photo editing app. Robust sync ameliorates a lot of these issues. You might lose your connection. Not so big a problem if you have your own local copy. One of the administrators is doing something that shuts off access to one copy of your data -- you still have another copy. The network is slow -- with synced data, you just have to send deltas. Robust sync doesn't completely solve everything, but it takes these problems -- which are often edge cases -- and it reduces their impact.
- gnok 16y agoI'd much prefer a unified view instead of sync. No connection? No problem, show me what I have in my local copy. Admittedly, there's no redundancy with unified views.
- protomyth 16y agoKind of like the old Newton soup view (instead of a memory card in the slot you have the "cloud"). Explanation: The Newton showed all the entries / files on the Newton plus any entries / files on the card as one view. Pull out the card and those entries disappeared.
- gnok 16y agoThat's pretty interesting. I wonder why this approach was never re-done with iPhone and MobileMe (Contact sync and Calendaring have big applications here). Perhaps there are important unsolved problems I'm overlooking.
- jancona 16y agoA longer treatment of these issues that's still relevant today is "A Note on Distributed Computing" by Ann Wollrath, Geoff Wyant, Jim Waldo and Samuel C. Kendall: http://labs.oracle.com/techrep/1994/abstract-29.html http://labs.oracle.com/techrep/1994/abstract-29.html
- briandoll 16y agoAbsolutely agree. I love that paper, too. I'll add a link to it in the post later today.
- shaggy 16y agoSadly the most fervent prognosticators of the "cloud" either won't read this or won't understand what it all means.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoCorollary: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...