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Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

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Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#51

Post by ziml77 »

kaba0 wrote: post #36
zgniatacz wrote: post #24

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra

I think every talk on complexity is meaningless, without taking into account the difference between accidental and essential complexity. There are problem domains where there is simply a minimal complexity required implicitly. You can’t write an insanely simple program that will render vector fonts, simply because the problem inherently has to have a fixed amount of complexity. Anything more (accidental complexity) i…

That page is a joke right? That last alternative really makes it seem that way. If you want simplicity, why would you use sed to get the first lines of a file? Head is a much simpler program that has a single job while sed has its own text transformation language.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#52

Post by api »

adevx wrote: post #49

I fell for the everything must be a microservice / distributed across as many servers as possible trap. Even though I've read so many warnings about it here on HA and knew upfront I might have to rewind everything. The setup : - Distributed file system using GlusterFS - DNS load balancing using Amazon Route 53 - PostgreSQL HA clusters using Patroni - A WireGuard mesh topology between all instances. Even though it was…

> Even though it was so much fun

That’s the root of quite a bit of evil in software. A closely related motive is a desire to show off.

Play is good for learning but not for production systems. You’ll regret it later when you are up at 4am on a Sunday morning troubleshooting some Byzantine stack.

The antidote is the realization that simplicity is harder than complexity. Simple but highly effective systems are the ones that should inspire awe and admiration. Complexity is a sign of an immature design or a lack of high level conceptual thinking. A system should be only complex enough to capture essential complexity (problem domain requirements) and no more.

One more thing… there is a ton of submarine marketing in our industry that encourages complexity because it’s profitable for vendors and cloud providers.

The design you outline leads to more cloud resource consumption, more lock in to cloud platforms, and eventually a need for lots of service mesh, config management, and orchestration products that if the project grows will eventually start costing money.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#53

Post by jiggawatts »

Puts wrote: post #25

When people face a new problem they intuitively try to find something they can add as a solution, not thinking about what they can remove to prevent the problem from occurring in the first place. This becomes apparent in the way marketing works. You sell products by promising they will solve a problem. You don't sell things by telling people what they really need to hear, that they just need less of everything. Simpl…

Did you just watch this tour of the Starbase with Elon Musk?

He spends about 5 minutes talking about how removing things is the most essential part of a good design: https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=833

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#54

Post by Buttons840 »

joekrill wrote: post #47
Buttons840 wrote: post #43

I'm going to make a controversial claim for the sake of argument. We can and will debate what programs are "simpler" all day, it's all subjective... except for one metric: line count. Line count is objective. Take pause before rejecting any change that uses fewer lines of code. It takes an awfully good abstraction to beat simply having less code.

It seems like it should be objective, but it isn't. Because you get people writing ridiculous "clever" one-liners that are difficult to parse and understand. That clever one-liner could be re-written to do the exact same thing and be much more clear and readable, but it would take, say, 8 lines instead of 1. Then there's the subjectiveness of what you actually consider a "line".

Fair. "Less code" is probably a better metric, but still has the same problem you describe.

Still, some argue that an 8 line for-loop is better than a 1 line map or something, but a map is more constrained in what it can do than a free style for-loop.

And 8 vs 1 lines in some corner of the program is less important than whether or not we make it a coding standard to write and use AbstractBeanThingyamabobs for all our stuff, etc.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#55

Post by mschuster91 »

sdevonoes wrote: post #31
mschuster91 wrote: post #6

To add a point: "simple" can also mean "standardized". Self-hosted or cloud-hosted Kubernetes is a highly complex system. But using it to power your internal tooling (e.g. Jira, Confluence, GitLab, Jenkins, whatever) over classic, manually-installed-on-VMs deployment has the advantage that you can drop in anyone with experience in Kubernetes to manage your workloads.

I would go one level up and ask "do we actually need Jira, Confluence, GitLab, Jenkins, whatever on premise?". The question then is not "K8s or manual way", but "Do we actually need K8s?"

Many companies in the EU actually blanket ban any storage of their sensitive information in the cloud, especially the Atlassian cloud after the Australian espionage law change.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#56

Post by api »

ziml77 wrote: post #51
kaba0 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think every talk on complexity is meaningless, without taking into account the difference between accidental and essential complexity. There are problem domains where there is simply a minimal complexity required implicitly. You can’t write an insanely simple program that will render vector fonts, simply because the problem inherently has to have a fixed amount of complexity. Anything more (accidental complexity) i…

That page is a joke right? That last alternative really makes it seem that way. If you want simplicity, why would you use sed to get the first lines of a file? Head is a much simpler program that has a single job while sed has its own text transformation language.

I totally agree, but I think today’s systems have more incidental than essential complexity.

The sentiment behind that list is okay but it does demonstrate a lot of ignorance The biggest joke is simple tables or file systems as a SQL alternative. If you do that for anything that needs more than just a map you will eventually end up with a badly implemented buggy slow relational database.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#57

Post by nodejs_rulez_1 »

zgniatacz wrote: post #24

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra

I remember one dev kept talking about simplicity, even made a session about it and then just lumped business logic, data access and transfer layer mapping into a single API file...

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#59

Post by lrem »

embik wrote: post #18
stingraycharles wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While what you’re saying is, of course, fair, the other side is also true: people often choose to complex a technology “because it’s future-proof!”, while they need just a simple system. There are tons of examples: CQRS over simple databases, Hadoop while a single server suffices, or even people choosing JIRA over a simple trello board. As such, the obvious answer is “it depends”, and making the right trade-off is ra…

> a single server suffices A genuine question that I wonder about: How does a single server protect you against someone in your DC pulling a plug by mistake or your cloud provider being unreliable? If it’s a database it seems like a huge potential for going out of business. I guess if you are running single-server databases you better have a good backup strategy anyway, but is that a risk people and businesses just a…

In short: yes.

The recent fire in a French DC saw serious disruption across all kinds of industries in many European countries. I know a sales engineer in a hardware manufacturing place, who was back to pen and paper until the IT provider figured out restores. But it wasn't that bad, as both the clients and competitors were decimated too.

Re: Simple Systems Have Less Downtime (2020)

#60

Post by magicalhippo »

mrweasel wrote: post #48
zgniatacz wrote: post #24

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra

He also have the quote: "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."

Dunno about that one. Our most reliable integrations have a lot of quite complex error handling in order to be highly reliable.
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