https://bravenewgeek.com/tag/reliability-engineering/Recent content in Reliability Engineering on Brave New GeekHugoen-usTue, 15 Dec 2015 18:57:41 -0600https://bravenewgeek.com/infrastructure-engineering-in-the-21st-century/Tue, 15 Dec 2015 18:57:41 -0600https://bravenewgeek.com/infrastructure-engineering-in-the-21st-century/<p>Infrastructure engineering is an inherently treacherous problem space because it’s core to so many things. Systems today are increasingly distributed and increasingly complex but are built on unreliable components and will continue to be. This includes unreliable networks and faulty hardware. The 21st century engineer understands <strong>failure is routine</strong>.</p> <p>Naturally, application developers would rather not have to think about low-level failure modes so they can focus on solving the problem at hand. Infrastructure engineers are then tasked with competing goals: provide enough abstraction to make application development tractable and provide enough reliability to make subsystems useful. The second goal often comes with an additional proviso in that there must be sufficient reliability without sacrificing performance to the point of no longer being useful. Anyone who has worked on enterprise messaging systems can tell you that these goals are often contradictory. The result is a wall of sand intended to keep the developer’s feet dry from the incoming tide. The 21st century engineer understands that <strong>in order to play in the sand, we all need to be comfortable getting our feet a little wet from time to time.</strong></p>