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One day, there will be a bigish war, and comms between the sides will be cut off, either by law, or all comms links severed. At that point, every global busine
by londons_explore 3y ago
One day, there will be a bigish war, and comms between the sides will be cut off, either by law, or all comms links severed.
At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.
I suspect that few businesses have prepared for such an eventuality, and I suspect severe disruption can be expected when it happens.
For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do is to never use sequences for database ID's. By using random id's, you can mostly let your replicated database partition itself, and a later merge isn't too hard as long as most users have been operating on only one side of the divide.
- krisoft 3y ago> At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work. Or give up serving one side. Probably the one the executives of the company don't live in. Like how many companies stopped operating in Russia after their war in Ukraine got into high gear.
- hx8 3y agoIn such a situation, I foresee something more like the splitting of the Roman Empire. There's no reason to stop serving global customers just because the users are separated from HQ. Especially if the servers are already on both sides of the geo-political border.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoThe Roman Empire split was relatively friendly. Theodosius split it between his two sons.
- ithkuil 3y agoThe Roman empire had a tradition of splitting the control of the areas between multiple people at several points starting from Diocletian's tetrarchy onward. The last east/west split was different on that it was that last one. In a way, you could look at the period of absolute control by a single person as an exception in Roman history.
- londons_explore 3y agoDid many businesses stop operating in russia? Or did many of those shops/restaurants/etc physically located in Russia simply rename and continue operations independent from the parent company? For example, Mcdonalds is now operated as Vkusno i tochka [1], and has awfully similar menu and branding to Mcdonalds. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkusno_i_tochka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkusno_i_tochka
- owlstuffing 3y ago“halves”
- NikolaNovak 3y agoI love, in honestly both somewhat sarcastic but mostly very real sense, that hacker news discussion of global thermonuclear war...is how to prepare your database unique ID scheme for unforeseen sharding :->
- mensetmanusman 3y agoJust do what everyone does to fragile egos. You show Russia and China what they believe, and you show the rest of the world something else.
- preommr 3y ago> For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do "Our new SaaS offers high security, reslience to deal with usage spikes, and compatability with doomsday scenarios where fascist governments have taken over during war-time while implementing draconic wars that are to sure to end with society as a dystopian nightmare. Oh, and we're Soc 2 compliant."
- 8note 3y agoThese types of things are already arriving via data sovereignty laws. Any global business will arrive in such a war already having split businesses
- charcircuit 3y agoThis already exists with China. You have to run a Chinese version of your infra that is separate from the global version.
- anigbrowl 3y agoIn such dire straits as you describe, companies and individuals will likely be forbidden to provide any sort of commercial services to the opposing side.
- fngjdflmdflg 3y agoAny distributed database worth its salt is already using UUIDs of some sort.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoI think most companies will naturally align a certain way and there won’t be a big deal compared to the actual war. The Western companies: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon will all align with the US The European companies will align with the US as well The Chinese companies Huwaei, ByteDance, Alibaba will align with China.