Re:Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed ...
by nine_k on Friday July 16, 2021 @10:49PM
(#27863233)
Every device has a small probability of failure.
If you just take one device, it can either be completely functional and chug along for 20 years, or completely fail, which happens rarely but is painful. In either case, your software can ignore the failure state, there's nothing it can do at the case of a failure.
If you take 1000 such devices, then the vast majority will be fine, but a small number of them will fail. No matter how you fix them and replace them, you will keep seeing some degraded nodes, or temporarily disconnected nodes because the network has glitches, too. So your software has to always be ready to face a failure of a remote node, and always be ready to gracefully handle it. This completely changes the way you think.
If you just take one device, it can either be completely functional and chug along for 20 years, or completely fail, which happens rarely but is painful. In either case, your software can ignore the failure state, there's nothing it can do at the case of a failure.
If you take 1000 such devices, then the vast majority will be fine, but a small number of them will fail. No matter how you fix them and replace them, you will keep seeing some degraded nodes, or temporarily disconnected nodes because the network has glitches, too. So your software has to always be ready to face a failure of a remote node, and always be ready to gracefully handle it. This completely changes the way you think.