On May 1, 2:29 pm, Jeff Wheeler <j...@inconcepts.biz> wrote:
What it really boils down to is this: if application developers are doing their jobs, a given service can be easy and inexpensive to distribute to unrelated systems/networks without a huge infrastructure expense. If the developers are not, you end up spending a lot of money on infrastructure to make up for code, databases, and APIs which were not designed with this in mind.
Umm... see the CAP theorem. There are certain things, such as ACID transactions, which are *impossible* to geographically distribute with redundancy in a performant and scalable way because of speed of light constraints. Of course web-startups like Reddit have no excuse in this area: they don't even *need* ACID transactions for anything they do, as what they are storing is utterly unimportant in the financial sense and can be handled with eventually-consistent semantics. But asynchronous replication doesn't cut it for something like stock trades, or even B2C order taking. I like to bag on my developers for not knowing anything about the infrastructure, but sometimes you just can't do it right because of physics. Or you can't do it right without writing your own OS, networking stacks, file systems, etc., which means it is essentially "impossible" in the real world.