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> For most businesses that aren't about massive scaling, Most business should care about distributed systems because they (often) need some form of high availa

> For most businesses that aren't about massive scaling, Most business should care about distributed systems because they (often) need some form of high availability. Sure, you're not scaling to Google or New York Times levels here, but if you want to survive any of the random crap that can happen to you, you can't have a single host per role. Yes, sure, you may not be worried about concurrent writes to multiple replicas, but what about reads from multiple replicas, or a read to a slave after a write to a master (lets say master just died in a horrible manner, and slave is now being hit with reads and writes)? PS: TCL is awesome.

davidw 12y ago
> (often) need some form of high availability I'd guess that, in reality, many don't really need high availability. I mean, it's not going to hurt if they have it, but if it comes at a cost of not doing other things with their limited resources, it may not be the best thing to be doing. BTW, it's Tcl, not TCL!
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  Gah, I should know better about the name. Let's just pretend I was yelling it because I was excited? k? Anyway, it's a gradient. Sure, most places don't need 99.9999% availability, but most places also can't afford to be down for a few hours to a day, especially during their peak season. So, do you need automatic failover and promotion? Probably not. Do you need contingency plans (with may/should include accounts with multiple vendors (even if something like a LiNode account with no boxes)) and have practiced brining everything up (or if you're e.g. a small retail shop, how to checkout), yes, most defiantly. Even if your distributed system isn't "moving" you still need to plan for things. Like I said, if your database server becomes unavailable, you need to know how much data hasn't made it to the spare, otherwise you need to ask "How much will I loose if I restore from my last backup". Things of that nature need to be planned around and known, even if the code doesn't need t care.

davidw 12y ago

> (often) need some form of high availability I'd guess that, in reality, many don't really need high availability. I mean, it's not going to hurt if they have it, but if it comes at a cost of not doing other things with their limited resources, it may not be the best thing to be doing. BTW, it's Tcl, not TCL!

jimktrains2 12y ago
Gah, I should know better about the name. Let's just pretend I was yelling it because I was excited? k? Anyway, it's a gradient. Sure, most places don't need 99.9999% availability, but most places also can't afford to be down for a few hours to a day, especially during their peak season. So, do you need automatic failover and promotion? Probably not. Do you need contingency plans (with may/should include accounts with multiple vendors (even if something like a LiNode account with no boxes)) and have practiced brining everything up (or if you're e.g. a small retail shop, how to checkout), yes, most defiantly. Even if your distributed system isn't "moving" you still need to plan for things. Like I said, if your database server becomes unavailable, you need to know how much data hasn't made it to the spare, otherwise you need to ask "How much will I loose if I restore from my last backup". Things of that nature need to be planned around and known, even if the code doesn't need t care.