The Indestructible Computing Blog is my attempt at framing what Indestructible Computing is and is not, and establishing a solid dialog on the subject in the hopes of raising the expectations we have for our friend the computer. In our daily experience with computers, we see spam, viruses, slow web pages, crashes, spinning clocks, and other minor annoyances that really don’t help our perception of what computers can do. What we don’t see is the infrastructure that quietly runs in the background, making sure that our money is moving around correctly without prying eyes, running our power plants, giving us the security of knowing that we can pick up the phone and call 9-1-1, and letting us go to the grocery store and pay for food with confidence that the computers will be up, even if our credit is maxed-out. But why are the two types of experiences so different?
Much comes down to expectation. We expect our computers at home to misbehave, but we are intolerant of retailers who lose our online shopping carts after an hour of our latest buying spree. After all, the commodity computers we purchase at our large electronic stores are throw-away, right? But how are they different than the commodity computers our banks and phone companies use? They’re not, actually. Advances in the quality of hardware have benefitted everyone alike. So why do we expect our computers at home to stop every so often and become enraged when our banks web sites are down for a few scheduled moments?
I remember one incident at a border crossing, where an immigration agent asked me what I did. My response was that I help companies design systems that will run for twenty to thirty years. She was incensed at the idea and told me that that was impossible. That was an epiphany for me. In a few words, almost two decades of frustration at trying to convey the concept of indestructibility was explained and left me feeling like a pile of broken glass. Perception of the unreliability of computers has become so ingrained in our culture that people simply don’t believe systems could be built to withstand disasters, yet only when the systems are visible. Infrastructure, however, isn’t perceived to be a “computer”, so it, whatever it is, supports our society and had better be always there.
Stay tuned for the next entry where I’ll explore this perception further.
Copyright © 2009 Randall S. Becker.
Good start, Randall - and stick with it.
ReplyDeleteMany years ago I worked with Dr Tim Chou at Tandem Computers to look at all the sources that could lead to systems failing - and the one that stood out was operations. Yes, within the data center, the old story of placing a vicious pit bull between the operator and the operations console was a good starting point.
But seriously, the reliability of the hardware could go to infinity and we would still be left with systems that failed unless we retained some portion of infrastructure dedicated to monitoring / take-over processing.
Again ... good start ...
Richard