

The Fallacies of Distributed Computing Reborn: The Cloud Era - briandoll
http://blog.newrelic.com/2011/01/06/the-fallacies-of-distributed-computing-reborn-the-cloud-era/

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stcredzero
A part of the solution: robust sync.

Let's take the typical example of a photo editing app. Robust sync ameliorates
a lot of these issues. You might lose your connection. Not so big a problem if
you have your own local copy. One of the administrators is doing something
that shuts off access to one copy of your data -- you still have another copy.
The network is slow -- with synced data, you just have to send deltas.

Robust sync doesn't completely solve everything, but it takes these problems
-- which are often edge cases -- and it reduces their impact.

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gnok
I'd much prefer a unified view instead of sync. No connection? No problem,
show me what I have in my local copy. Admittedly, there's no redundancy with
unified views.

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protomyth
Kind of like the old Newton soup view (instead of a memory card in the slot
you have the "cloud").

Explanation: The Newton showed all the entries / files on the Newton plus any
entries / files on the card as one view. Pull out the card and those entries
disappeared.

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gnok
That's pretty interesting. I wonder why this approach was never re-done with
iPhone and MobileMe (Contact sync and Calendaring have big applications here).
Perhaps there are important unsolved problems I'm overlooking.

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Yoric
One point seems to be missing: web applications that do have a web front are
actually distributed not only on the servers, but also on the clients. This
makes reasoning on reliability or security even harder.

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shaggy
Sadly the most fervent prognosticators of the "cloud" either won't read this
or won't understand what it all means.

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RyanMcGreal
Corollary:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html)

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jancona
A longer treatment of these issues that's still relevant today is "A Note on
Distributed Computing" by Ann Wollrath, Geoff Wyant, Jim Waldo and Samuel C.
Kendall: <http://labs.oracle.com/techrep/1994/abstract-29.html>

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briandoll
Absolutely agree. I love that paper, too. I'll add a link to it in the post
later today.

