Dan Pritchett presents some good insight in respect of large scale systems.
I’m left to ponder the fact that whilst Dan is deliberately creating these systems….
I find myself looking at nondeterministic systems a lot lately. Many solutions for the challenges of extreme scale involve relaxing constraints and coping with the ensuing chaos.
….there’s many a techie out there building large systems unaware of the fact that they can’t assert order on such a beast. All they can do is hold back the wave of chaos whilst having to clear up the odd drop that made it over the levee (e.g. consequences of a network outage or operation ordering problems). They are a long way from appreciating that chaos is a given, let alone actively managing it.
In a further twist of irony for all that chaos seems to introduce complexity, if you accept it’s existence and work with it you often end up with something simpler than was ever possible with “old world” thinking.
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