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The beauty of distributed systems is that you spread your services across lots of different computers, so that when one of them goes down, they all go down.
by Jasper_ 7y ago
The beauty of distributed systems is that you spread your services across lots of different computers, so that when one of them goes down, they all go down.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago“A distributed system is the one that prevents you from working because of the failure of a machine that you had never heard of.”
- itronitron 7y agoand typically that machine is the authentication server
- Terretta 7y agoJoking aside, more typically the server you never heard of will be something in the CSP’s control plane. But that’s just a distraction. We hear about those outages once in a blue moon, because many rely on them. What we don’t hear about is that any given colo, managed service, or CSP customer’s apps go down on their own, all the time, not because of the colo or CSP. Such outages are banal, so we forget how much more likely they are, and fail to risk-weight our engineering efforts accordingly.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoIt's not really distributed if there's a single point of failure?
- erik_seaberg 7y agoRedundancy isn't the only reason to make a system distributed. There's also latency, cost to scale, and federated management. DNS is very distributed but redundancy is opt-in. Many distributed systems try to be reliable by retrying failed nodes' work, but designs aren't always sound.
- eyjafjallajokul 7y agoNot sure what you mean here. Would a similarly architected non-distributed system have higher levels of availability?
- WilliamEdward 7y agoI think they're being sarcastic? The idea with a distributed system is if one part goes down it can still mostly function, which google have managed to fail at somehow.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xvector 7y agoHe was joking :) a buggy or poorly designed distributed system might behave more like a house of cards than independent silos