Re:Inside the longest Atlassian outage
by lelanthran on Thursday April 14, 2022 @05:01AM
(#31024681)
> Sometimes manure will always hit the fan. Being robust means being able to handle that.
You're never going to get perfect error handling in any non-trivial system.
Being robust means that you plan for particular states (like "deleting the production data"). That doesn't mean that your plan is any good, or that your plan will fix the problem, only that you have a sequence of steps developed in advance of the problem.
Sometimes the state in question is considered too unlikely[1] to ever occur, so is ignored with the caveat "too unlikely", such as planning for the case when the company files for bankruptcy and all software needs to be sped up by a factor of two in order to halve computing costs.
Not all possible future states need to be accommodated for in the tech stack - that doesn't mean stack is not "robust".
[1] Or if likely, is such a large problem that all the other problems are irrelevant.
You're never going to get perfect error handling in any non-trivial system.
Being robust means that you plan for particular states (like "deleting the production data"). That doesn't mean that your plan is any good, or that your plan will fix the problem, only that you have a sequence of steps developed in advance of the problem.
Sometimes the state in question is considered too unlikely[1] to ever occur, so is ignored with the caveat "too unlikely", such as planning for the case when the company files for bankruptcy and all software needs to be sped up by a factor of two in order to halve computing costs.
Not all possible future states need to be accommodated for in the tech stack - that doesn't mean stack is not "robust".
[1] Or if likely, is such a large problem that all the other problems are irrelevant.