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This was written in 1985. That's 36 year ago. The more things change, the more they have stayed the same. > Even in a high availability system, hardware is a m

This was written in 1985. That's 36 year ago. The more things change, the more they have stayed the same. > Even in a high availability system, hardware is a minor contributor to system outages. [...] > By applying the concepts of fault-tolerant hardware to software construction, software MTBF can be raised by several orders of magnitude. [...] > Dealing with system configuration, operations, and maintenance remains an unsolved problem.

perl4ever 5y ago
> Dealing with system configuration, operations, and maintenance remains an unsolved problem. I have no experience whatsoever with them, but I think I've seen many mentions over the years of how IBM mainframes have been designed to keep running while anything is modified or swapped out. I also remember years ago reading about a research OS, which journaled everything such that you could supposedly pull the plug at any random moment and recover the running state with no trouble. Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20030430223846/http://www.eros-os.org/essays/Persistence.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030430223846/http://www.eros-o...
- devnulll 5y ago
  At a high level, think of how much money Amazon pours into AWS, Microsoft spends on Azure or O365, or Google spends on their GCP & Internal systems.The dollar amounts spent are staggering, yet all major systems continue to have outages that usually boil down to "Human Error". The stability of the mainframes may be misleading, as the older isolated systems are different than the networked systems. I would postulate that for a general purpose computer, software stability is directly proportional to connectivity.