Re:Announcing Beta For Local SSD
by contingencies on Wednesday October 29, 2014 @11:05PM
(#8531127)
Pfft. Classic Hackernews... downvote to pluto without discussion despite validity of alternate perspective. One day you kids will learn :)
To spell it out, "Optimization considered harmful" means time may be misspent caring about these things, and/or actually result in changes to your application or service that will take it backwards in measurable ways.
"In particular, optimization introduces complexity, and as well as introducing tighter coupling between components and layers." means, for example, that relying on Google Cloud's SSD support to run your service locks you in and makes you dependent on them, their ability to provide availability, their internal decision on how long they choose to maintain that service offering, and their internal decisions on pricing. It further suggests that this time may be better spent getting to the heart of the problem, eg. removing the disk I/O performance constraint from your application that made you want an SSD in the first place by sharding your datastore.
This is a pretty valid line of thinking as an antidote to 'rah rah'.
To spell it out, "Optimization considered harmful" means time may be misspent caring about these things, and/or actually result in changes to your application or service that will take it backwards in measurable ways.
"In particular, optimization introduces complexity, and as well as introducing tighter coupling between components and layers." means, for example, that relying on Google Cloud's SSD support to run your service locks you in and makes you dependent on them, their ability to provide availability, their internal decision on how long they choose to maintain that service offering, and their internal decisions on pricing. It further suggests that this time may be better spent getting to the heart of the problem, eg. removing the disk I/O performance constraint from your application that made you want an SSD in the first place by sharding your datastore.
This is a pretty valid line of thinking as an antidote to 'rah rah'.