4 ms·

Is "brownout" a common or standard term in the industry? First time I see it.

aabhay 1y ago
First heard about this when docker started rate limiting
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Yes I heard of GitHub doing it I think You intentionally break something just a little to force dependents to notice, before turning it off completely
znpy 1y ago
Yes. Going from green to red is called “browning out”.
- mattkrause 1y ago
  Is that the origin? I thought it was an analogy to the electrical problem: flickering lights due to high demand.
  - wafflemaker 1y ago
    Don't know the origin, but with no technical background past using Linux, I only ever heard of brownouts in contexts of failing (often 3rd world) electrical infrastructure. Mostly Africa and South America (don't mean to offend anybody living there, I know they're vast continents with many rich/infrastructure-stable countries too).
    - lstodd 1y ago
      Origin is the electrical grid overload which caused incandescent lights to literally "brown out", as has been mentioned here. Later is was coopted to mean any problems with power supply not including outright drop to zero-zero/disconnections. cf microcontroller brown-out handling, also mentioned above. Then later it seems it was generalized to mean sort-of-non-terminal problem with supply of most anything.
    - lagniappe 1y ago
      Very odd to call it a 3rd world phenomenon when California calls it a normal day.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  That is not where the term comes from. Lights out -> Blackout (WWII, to stop overflying aircraft from having easy targets and to disrupt navigation). Reduced voltage on the grid -> lights go from white to orange and eventually to brown, not quite a blackout -> brown out.
  - mattkrause 1y ago
    The word seems to slightly predate WWII. The OED reports that the disrupted-electrical supply sense of blackout was first used in 1934; the air-defence one (no light) in 1935. However, the OG use seems to be in the theatre, where the lights are shut off during set changes (1913, probably earlier). Brownout does seem to be a WWII-era term, but more related to conservation/shortages than air defence.
miki123211 1y ago
Yes. It refers to a situation where a system is deliberately designed to fail (usually for short periods of time), to still provide some level of service while alerting others that the system is soon to be turned off.
numpad0 1y ago
Commonly used in microcontrollers to describe supply voltage dropping below threshold. It could cause RAM corruption, erratic behaviors of robots, overshoot in voltage regulators, battery fluid leaks etc., and so optional detection features are often made available to reset or stop the processor and notify the application on next boot. It's also used in utility power supplies to describe line voltage going below spec. It's considered a dangerous condition in that context too, as lots of non-smart equipment tend to run at higher amperage at lower voltage and/or fail to start/run and catch fire. 1: https://developerhelp.microchip.com/xwiki/bin/view/products/mcu-mpu/8-bit-avr/structure/bod/ https://developerhelp.microchip.com/xwiki/bin/view/products/...
habitue 1y ago
We did this at stripe when deprecating TLS 1.0, and called it a brown out (I don't know the origin of the term in software). You do it when you have a bunch of automated integrations with you and you have to break them. The lights arent on at the client: their dev teams are focused on other things, so you have to wake them up to a change that's happening (either by causing their alerting to go off, or their customers to complain because their site is broken)
- dkdcio 1y ago
  have also heard this as doing a “scream test” — turn it off, see who screams about it
Beltran 1y ago
Yes, another example of brownout at https://spring.io/blog/2022/12/14/notice-of-permissions-changes-to-repo-spring-io-january-2023 https://spring.io/blog/2022/12/14/notice-of-permissions-chan... It is probably the only way to warn users when you do not know the contact info.
usrme 1y ago
There was actually a really terrible brown-out by Poetry (a Python dependency management and packaging tool) where they introduced sporadic failures to people's CI/CD systems: https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/pull/6297 https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/pull/6297

First heard about this when docker started rate limiting

Yes I heard of GitHub doing it I think You intentionally break something just a little to force dependents to notice, before turning it off completely

znpy 1y ago

Yes. Going from green to red is called “browning out”.

mattkrause 1y ago
Is that the origin? I thought it was an analogy to the electrical problem: flickering lights due to high demand.
- wafflemaker 1y ago
  Don't know the origin, but with no technical background past using Linux, I only ever heard of brownouts in contexts of failing (often 3rd world) electrical infrastructure. Mostly Africa and South America (don't mean to offend anybody living there, I know they're vast continents with many rich/infrastructure-stable countries too).
  - lstodd 1y ago
    Origin is the electrical grid overload which caused incandescent lights to literally "brown out", as has been mentioned here. Later is was coopted to mean any problems with power supply not including outright drop to zero-zero/disconnections. cf microcontroller brown-out handling, also mentioned above. Then later it seems it was generalized to mean sort-of-non-terminal problem with supply of most anything.
  - lagniappe 1y ago
    Very odd to call it a 3rd world phenomenon when California calls it a normal day.
jacquesm 1y ago
That is not where the term comes from. Lights out -> Blackout (WWII, to stop overflying aircraft from having easy targets and to disrupt navigation). Reduced voltage on the grid -> lights go from white to orange and eventually to brown, not quite a blackout -> brown out.
- mattkrause 1y ago
  The word seems to slightly predate WWII. The OED reports that the disrupted-electrical supply sense of blackout was first used in 1934; the air-defence one (no light) in 1935. However, the OG use seems to be in the theatre, where the lights are shut off during set changes (1913, probably earlier). Brownout does seem to be a WWII-era term, but more related to conservation/shortages than air defence.

miki123211 1y ago

Yes. It refers to a situation where a system is deliberately designed to fail (usually for short periods of time), to still provide some level of service while alerting others that the system is soon to be turned off.

numpad0 1y ago

Commonly used in microcontrollers to describe supply voltage dropping below threshold. It could cause RAM corruption, erratic behaviors of robots, overshoot in voltage regulators, battery fluid leaks etc., and so optional detection features are often made available to reset or stop the processor and notify the application on next boot. It's also used in utility power supplies to describe line voltage going below spec. It's considered a dangerous condition in that context too, as lots of non-smart equipment tend to run at higher amperage at lower voltage and/or fail to start/run and catch fire. 1: https://developerhelp.microchip.com/xwiki/bin/view/products/mcu-mpu/8-bit-avr/structure/bod/ https://developerhelp.microchip.com/xwiki/bin/view/products/...

habitue 1y ago

We did this at stripe when deprecating TLS 1.0, and called it a brown out (I don't know the origin of the term in software). You do it when you have a bunch of automated integrations with you and you have to break them. The lights arent on at the client: their dev teams are focused on other things, so you have to wake them up to a change that's happening (either by causing their alerting to go off, or their customers to complain because their site is broken)

dkdcio 1y ago
have also heard this as doing a “scream test” — turn it off, see who screams about it

Beltran 1y ago

Yes, another example of brownout at https://spring.io/blog/2022/12/14/notice-of-permissions-changes-to-repo-spring-io-january-2023 https://spring.io/blog/2022/12/14/notice-of-permissions-chan... It is probably the only way to warn users when you do not know the contact info.

usrme 1y ago

There was actually a really terrible brown-out by Poetry (a Python dependency management and packaging tool) where they introduced sporadic failures to people's CI/CD systems: https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/pull/6297 https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/pull/6297