Comment by onion2k
6 years ago
GitHub hasn't collapsed killing thousands or needing to be completely rebuilt though, so that analogy doesn't work. This is more like there's a flood in the lobby so maintenance has closed the front door for a bit.
6 years ago
GitHub hasn't collapsed killing thousands or needing to be completely rebuilt though, so that analogy doesn't work. This is more like there's a flood in the lobby so maintenance has closed the front door for a bit.
I didn't mean for the point to be about the consequences of the failure. What I was trying to argue against was the notion that it's fine for things to fail, just by virtue of them being hard. There are a lot of complicated systems in the world that work extremely reliably.
Planes sometimes crash without killing people or needing to be completely rebuilt; that doesn't mean that this is clearly undesirable.
It's not a good thing that Github is down. It's an inevitable thing that comes from complexity at scale though. Hard things are hard, whether that's planes, buildings, or web apps.