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"though at the end of the day" "nothing is perfect" ... Aerospike makes blatantly ridiculous promises in their high-level descriptions of their database. That m

by ploxiln 12y ago

"though at the end of the day" "nothing is perfect" ... Aerospike makes blatantly ridiculous promises in their high-level descriptions of their database. That makes our jobs harder (before Aphyr makes them easier) because we don't know what Aerospike is actually good at or exactly what kinds of data loss potential we need to architect our systems around. Isn't it kind of annoying that some technical projects bolster their popularity/ecosystem with very fancy websites and impressive/competitive claims, but to really do your job right you have to throw all that away? The best you can do is try to get a sense from the reports of others who have tried something (and may or may not have been rigorous in their evaluation) so you can pick good candidates to even put through trials. (so again, thanks Aphyr)

gmagnusson 12y ago
I can't and won't defend Aerospike's descriptions on website or white paper. And yes, "Thanks Aphyr". I came across Aerospike technology via a pre-existing system at a previous employer, and watched that system scale up and perform in a serious way. It wasn't all unicorns and roses all the time as real life never is, but in the context of the real world, it was great. The software is rock solid in a way I've rarely come across, and support was spectacular. (I forget my current production clusters are even running sometimes they are so stable, reliable and self-operating) And at the end of the day, there was no other solution out there remotely competitive that we could find. And I looked - not because we were dissatisfied, but because that was our fiduciary responsibility to the company, to ensure that we were deploying the most cost-effective systems that met our feature and performance requirements. Ultimately yes - I think that as an engineer, you need to understand what your tools are really capable of and avoid doing what I call "BDD" (Blog-Driven Design). That isn't the ideal answer - it would be nice to have a reliable understanding of the capabilities of the materials we use to build systems (like civil engineers can reason about materials like steel and concrete in repeatable ways) but what we call "software engineering and architecture" is still a very young discipline, very often with unrealistic expectations about our ability to deliver in given budgetary and temporal constraints, so we do what we can.

by ploxiln 12y ago

gmagnusson 12y ago

I can't and won't defend Aerospike's descriptions on website or white paper. And yes, "Thanks Aphyr". I came across Aerospike technology via a pre-existing system at a previous employer, and watched that system scale up and perform in a serious way. It wasn't all unicorns and roses all the time as real life never is, but in the context of the real world, it was great. The software is rock solid in a way I've rarely come across, and support was spectacular. (I forget my current production clusters are even running sometimes they are so stable, reliable and self-operating) And at the end of the day, there was no other solution out there remotely competitive that we could find. And I looked - not because we were dissatisfied, but because that was our fiduciary responsibility to the company, to ensure that we were deploying the most cost-effective systems that met our feature and performance requirements. Ultimately yes - I think that as an engineer, you need to understand what your tools are really capable of and avoid doing what I call "BDD" (Blog-Driven Design). That isn't the ideal answer - it would be nice to have a reliable understanding of the capabilities of the materials we use to build systems (like civil engineers can reason about materials like steel and concrete in repeatable ways) but what we call "software engineering and architecture" is still a very young discipline, very often with unrealistic expectations about our ability to deliver in given budgetary and temporal constraints, so we do what we can.