Pragmatic Dictator

No doubt many are aware of the fact that bird flu has hit East Anglia and there’s plenty of discussion about future implications so I shan’t be dwelling on that.

From a purely techie standpoint there are some interesting parallels with the way we build and deploy IT systems. Consider that the poultry farm where the outbreak occurred claimed to be keeping all it’s birds in buildings providing “secure biological containment” such that this sort of thing shouldn’t happen and yet it did happen and look at the damage! Does this remind you of the average corporate with all its systems centralized and hidden behind a firewall?

Since the original outbreak there’s been follow on discussion about what would have happened had the birds in question been free-range. These birds would, for a start, have stronger immune systems and not be so closely packed thus potentially limiting the impact. Sounds a little like a distributed system maybe?

What about issues related to the growth of London? Transport is over-stretched because there are too many people trying to get to work morning and evening. We build more roads or attempt to cram more trains into an already congested timetable which temporarily fixes the problem and attracts more people leading to a further transport disaster and so the cycle continues. Similar effects can be seen in locating suitable housing, refuse management and water systems. All of which sounds to me like the regular stresses and strains we suffer attempting to scale our centralized IT systems to cope with load.

One suggestion for addressing the problems involves moving business out of London to locations in Wales or the Midlands or Scotland. Of course, we’d need to improve the transport network making it easier to get to airports from these other locations, perhaps building additional roads to make access easier. The argument being that such a distributed approach might be easier to build, maintain and scale because it encourages more local commuting with fewer people converging on the same place. Sounds a little like the sort of approach used by MySpace or Google?

There are other examples of distributed systems lying around like the internal workings of our own bodies. And yet, in spite of a host of counter examples and failures we still feel compelled to pursue policies of centralization in towns, poultry farms and IT systems. Hmmmmm.

Dunno what it means, dunno who’s right (or indeed if anyone is) but it’s interesting for sure.

Technorati Tags: distributed systems, engineering, technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Architecture, Distributed Systems, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.