Ep 26: How To Build Resilient Distributed Systems with Bestselling Author Sam Newman

Yeah, it is because distributed systems are really hard and it's easy for people to, and it, If you get to it through microservices, it's quite easy to just get slowly kind of boiling a frog.

It gets harder and harder and harder.

It started quite straightforwardly.

The irony is the more successful you become, the more scale, the more users you've got, then suddenly it becomes much, much harder at an almost exponential rate.

I think it's partly that the problems of distributed systems are largely about the problems of failure.

But when you don't have much load... and you've got a small number of calls, failure is less likely to occur.

You're less likely to run out of resources.

You're less likely to see partitions in the live.

And so you're not as exposed to those things.

So it's only really once you're already to the point where you're successful, where you're basically saturating resources, or where you're starting, you've got a sheer enough volume of calls, you're starting to see component failure more regularly.

You start to understand where you've got yourself.

And that's kind of why I try to distill down, like, why are distributed systems complicated? Because I think...

I remember the eight fallacies of distributed computing, and I can never remember eight things.

As I've got older, I don't know if it's my self-diagnosed ADHD brain or whatever else it might be, or just cognitive decline caused by age.

I couldn't remember all eight.

And so I kind of worked out that actually, if you explain to people, there are three reasons why distributed systems are difficult.

One, you can't make information move between two points instantly.

Two, sometimes the thing you want to talk to isn't there.

And three, resources run out.

fundamentally underpins every single challenge that we experience at a technical level.

with distributed systems.

It's just that as you do more of it, these things are much more likely to bite you on your bum.

I mean, technically speaking, if you build a single, if you build a, say a monolithic web application, you have a distributed system, right? The clients are looking at your website in a browser.

So that's a program running on your device, looking at a server on a backend.

The database is probably on a third machine.