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Redundant Stories about Redundancy
- Kinrany 6y agoMost software fails differently: in 95% cases it works 100% of the time, in 5% cases it always fails. You can't use two identical pieces of software for redundancy. So this kind of redundancy only makes sense in rare cases: 1. There are two different pieces of software that do the same thing. 2. They are interchangeable enough, you don't need a fat adapter for each one. 3. The fault is not in one of their shared dependencies. 1 and 3 are rare because we try to reuse as much software as we can. That said, this does happen a lot with web standards: if a standard exists as an upgrade over a previous standard, being able to fall back to the old standard is a common requirement.
- pjc50 6y agoThe failure modes of software and hardware are different, and this needs to be taken into consideration. If you take a reel of 1000 resistors, and build a bunch of boards with them, then one fails: local redundancy can help, and the worst case is the failure of the board around that resistor. If you take something like left-pad, then each usage of it is not a separate component, they're all the same component, and will fail globally all at once or not at all.
- pc86 6y agoOff-topic, but I guess this moved down a spot before the second page loaded so it showed up twice. Gave me a chuckle considering the title. https://imgur.com/a/HMyuDkl https://imgur.com/a/HMyuDkl