Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

I have made a phone call. It’s not clear the phone system could be restarted. For example the control plane (SS7) is simply transmitted over the links it controls. It was built incrementally as a continually running system for more than a century and certain bootstraps/incremental elements were long since optimized out. Note that this is unrelated to the fanatical backwards compatibility at the edge which you might think would imply that it is restartable.

The Internet, I think, is restartable as long as layer 0 were available. It’s not really clear what it would mean for the Internet to need to be restarted — perhaps some attack/failure of the BGP infrastructure?

I agree, there are actually two problems here:

One is technical, and to do with the service and how to deal with it.

One is political, and to do with who gets the blame when the service inevitably fails.

OP needs to work out if they're being tasked with the job as the answer to the technical problem or the political problem. Because management could be very aware that this is a ticking bomb with no technical solution, and have appointed OP as a scapegoat to take the blame when it blows up.

Damn. Everyone here seems to advise you to just protect your own ass as a top priority. Is that a product of US work culture?

If you where in a sound organisation, which I would say most Swedish IT organisations are, you need to think about the company and the clients first.

Someone advised you to: “don’t do anything until explicitly asked to”. I think that’s just bad advise. You obviously know this is a major problem and risk. You also have some ideas about how to proceeds in mitigating and solving it. You should jump at the chance to help your company with this. Highlight this directly to your managers, talk with as many as you can, gather the information you need, get the approvals, and fixed the problem ASAP or find someone who can.

Your clients and customers might be badly affected when hell breaks loose.

I think anyone advising being passive, or plainly hiding from the problem, is totally wrong. Those are not the kind of colleagues I would want.

Get to work.

>That's called doing it manually.

Yes, a common feature in unstable environments. Automation is an ideal, but not a necessity, and it's not always viable or cost-effective.

But also that the unfailing competency means that you need to contiously maintain (all aspects of the) automation without fail, again in spite of a changing environment. Across everyone who does things.

>What you're doing is making excuses rather than holding yourself to a higher level of quality.

And what you're doing is pretending that firing off blind, trivial prescriptions is a useful activity -- perhaps I'll soon find you selling self-help books as well :-)

Automation is not an answer that can always be applied trivially; especially retroactively. Even despite all the marketing that will tell you otherwise.