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I was just rewatching Jonathan Blow's talk, where he discusses the Five 9s > ... We don't use this anymore, in part because the number would be going down and

by gnyman 4y ago

I was just rewatching Jonathan Blow's talk, where he discusses the Five 9s > ... We don't use this anymore, in part because the number would be going down and we can't make it go up anymore ... https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704 https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704 I don't have a strong opinion of an hour of downtime is bad or not, and I think the concern about five nines for everything was silly. But it's an interesting talk I think it's worth watching. Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried?

bob1029 4y ago
> Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried? I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from. Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate. Looking at a subset of an entire system and asking "is that database resilient to x 9's" and then worrying about that as your new target is how you wind up with something so inherently complex that the effective resiliency is somewhere around a single machine circa 1999. Instead of looking at every piece of hardware as a potential time bomb, you could start to embrace higher-quality components and arrive back at something that resembles a mainframe again.
- mozman 4y ago
  > Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from. Complexity comes from hiring. Nobody wants to work on old reliable tech because it’s boring and uncommon.
danpalmer 4y ago
Jonathan Blow is a good speaker – I haven't seen this talk (will watch later) but I'm sure the content is good. However, he has also not worked in a tech company of the kinds we see today (games are a different business), and he hugely underestimates the necessary complexity of systems. He is right that there's a lot of unnecessary complexity, and that we should push back on complexity of all kinds, but I've always found his opinions around this to be naive, to lack nuance, and to lack experience. His arguments often boil down to criticising progress rather than acknowledging the issues progress brings and finding ways to work around or minimise those issues. Getting to five 9s is hard, and as software does more it'll get harder, but it's not impossible, particularly if we look at five-9s from the user's perspective, as clients get smarter we have more leeway to accept minor downtime without harming the user experience.

by gnyman 4y ago

bob1029 4y ago

> Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried? I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from. Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate. Looking at a subset of an entire system and asking "is that database resilient to x 9's" and then worrying about that as your new target is how you wind up with something so inherently complex that the effective resiliency is somewhere around a single machine circa 1999. Instead of looking at every piece of hardware as a potential time bomb, you could start to embrace higher-quality components and arrive back at something that resembles a mainframe again.

mozman 4y ago
> Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from. Complexity comes from hiring. Nobody wants to work on old reliable tech because it’s boring and uncommon.

danpalmer 4y ago

Jonathan Blow is a good speaker – I haven't seen this talk (will watch later) but I'm sure the content is good. However, he has also not worked in a tech company of the kinds we see today (games are a different business), and he hugely underestimates the necessary complexity of systems. He is right that there's a lot of unnecessary complexity, and that we should push back on complexity of all kinds, but I've always found his opinions around this to be naive, to lack nuance, and to lack experience. His arguments often boil down to criticising progress rather than acknowledging the issues progress brings and finding ways to work around or minimise those issues. Getting to five 9s is hard, and as software does more it'll get harder, but it's not impossible, particularly if we look at five-9s from the user's perspective, as clients get smarter we have more leeway to accept minor downtime without harming the user experience.