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Interesting. For two reasons. In the many years that I developed software this was known as the producer/consumer problem [1]. A name that is somewhat (to me
by stkni 5y ago
Interesting. For two reasons. In the many years that I developed software this was known as the producer/consumer problem [1]. A name that is somewhat (to me) more expressive than back-pressure. But that's just my opinion!
What's different now, as the article points out, is the growth of micro-service architectures. Effectively creating a lot of tiny producer/consumer problems across the solution space.
Sometimes, I'm glad I don't write code anymore, but only sometimes :-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer%E2%80%93consumer_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer%E2%80%93consumer_prob...
- tootie 5y agoYeah right. This seems like fancy talk for the same scaling problems we've had forever. And it was 100X worse before cloud computing. System-to-system scale problems are generally a lot easier to deal with because you always have the option of resetting expectations with users. Serving web requests has to be real-time, but if a data pipeline has to be overnight due to cost constraints, you can just make the argument to management and do it.
- stonemetal12 5y agoYeah, when I was in school it was called "producer/consumer problem" too, back pressure was considered one of the solutions to the problem(what he calls control). I guess someone somewhere confused the two, and it kinda stuck.