3 ms·

I disagree: you can optimise for resilience. It means trading off efficiency, for sure, but it's very possible. Have 2 or 3 failover servers, redundant people,

I disagree: you can optimise for resilience. It means trading off efficiency, for sure, but it's very possible. Have 2 or 3 failover servers, redundant people, backup after every transaction. Mirror your infrastructure to a provider in another hemisphere. It's not cheap, but you can do it. I think the author means "against efficiency" rather than "against optimisation". And then I'd totally agree.

rcxdude 2y ago
Indeed. It is for sure possible to have an inefficient and non-resilient system. But I think the general point that efficiency tends to trade off against resilience is an important one which too few people understand. (one specific example from queuing theory which I wish more people understood was the tradeoff between resource utilization and latency. If you want something or someone to be busy almost all of the time, there must be a long queue which increases the latency of access, in the limit getting to 100% utilization the expected queue length grows without bound).