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A good thing with "single computer" is that you have less complexity going into it so failures will be less frequent. For a lot of cases, that will be enough. I

A good thing with "single computer" is that you have less complexity going into it so failures will be less frequent. For a lot of cases, that will be enough. It's also easier to build a resilient system starting from a single machine than from a cluster: less components to replicate to ensure they're redundant.

jiggawatts 5y ago
Something I've been telling customers for years is: I would rather have a standalone SQL Server Standard Edition instance on VMware than an Enterprise Edition cluster on anything. Simple means that there's less things to break. This isn't just academic. My experience with clusters is that the clustering itself causes more problems than it solves. (Don't think this is somehow isolated to Windows. ZooKeeper will refuse to start after a power outage for no discernible reason. Etc...)
- thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
  > My experience with clusters is that the clustering itself causes more problems than it solves. There's also a whole slew of failure modes that are capable of bringing down entire clusters if a single machine misbehaves. Usually to do with situations where the nodes are reachable, but some resource (I/O, latency, bandwidth) is uncharacteristically slow on one of the machines. I'm yet to encounter a distributed system that handles that situation well
  - travisjungroth 5y ago
    Some people see small twin engine airplanes as safer than single engine. Single point of failure and all that. The problem is that the two engines of an airplane aren’t independent of each other in the factors that threaten an engine. Same pilot, same fuel. Separate mechanical parts, but that’s a minority of issues. Most engine-outs in small airplanes are caused by running out of fuel. Your two engines don’t help you there. If anything it’s more likely because of mismanaging the complex fuel system. The most common phase for loss of an engine is on take off (misfueled, mechanical issue). This is what your comment reminded me of. With two engines, you’re more likely to have a mechanical issue on take off. While it’s generally theoretically survivable, handling one-sided power loss on takeoff requires a quick and counterintuitive response. That requires consistent training, more than most pilots do. In a small, recreational twin, the most common outcome for an engine misbehaving on take off is it rolls the airplane, taking down the whole cluster.
- GiorgioG 5y ago
  I can’t echo this enough. At work our DevOps folks started out of the gate with a Postgres cluster (hosted in our K8s infrastructure) and it’s been a nightmare. Luckily we’re still in development mode and haven’t moved any customers to our new architecture. Complexity kills and most of the time YAGNI.

jiggawatts 5y ago

Something I've been telling customers for years is: I would rather have a standalone SQL Server Standard Edition instance on VMware than an Enterprise Edition cluster on anything. Simple means that there's less things to break. This isn't just academic. My experience with clusters is that the clustering itself causes more problems than it solves. (Don't think this is somehow isolated to Windows. ZooKeeper will refuse to start after a power outage for no discernible reason. Etc...)

thow-58d4e8b 5y ago
> My experience with clusters is that the clustering itself causes more problems than it solves. There's also a whole slew of failure modes that are capable of bringing down entire clusters if a single machine misbehaves. Usually to do with situations where the nodes are reachable, but some resource (I/O, latency, bandwidth) is uncharacteristically slow on one of the machines. I'm yet to encounter a distributed system that handles that situation well
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  Some people see small twin engine airplanes as safer than single engine. Single point of failure and all that. The problem is that the two engines of an airplane aren’t independent of each other in the factors that threaten an engine. Same pilot, same fuel. Separate mechanical parts, but that’s a minority of issues. Most engine-outs in small airplanes are caused by running out of fuel. Your two engines don’t help you there. If anything it’s more likely because of mismanaging the complex fuel system. The most common phase for loss of an engine is on take off (misfueled, mechanical issue). This is what your comment reminded me of. With two engines, you’re more likely to have a mechanical issue on take off. While it’s generally theoretically survivable, handling one-sided power loss on takeoff requires a quick and counterintuitive response. That requires consistent training, more than most pilots do. In a small, recreational twin, the most common outcome for an engine misbehaving on take off is it rolls the airplane, taking down the whole cluster.
GiorgioG 5y ago
I can’t echo this enough. At work our DevOps folks started out of the gate with a Postgres cluster (hosted in our K8s infrastructure) and it’s been a nightmare. Luckily we’re still in development mode and haven’t moved any customers to our new architecture. Complexity kills and most of the time YAGNI.