Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sitkack 3182 days ago
You are both right. But both wrong. If you want better consistency, use either object storage or a database. If you are mutating multiple entities and need consistency, now you need a distributed transaction.

But ALL cloud providers provide warning before an instance is shutdown. There is absolutely no reason, other than a crash for an instance to have a hard shutdown.

1 comments

He makes valid points, but in defense of an original ridiculous statement that the articles suggestions are extremely dangerous. There are all sorts of benefits to an ACID database, it's just not reasonable to scream about the necessity of it because reboots are scary.
I agree.

But! Lots of applications aren't built to handle partial writes, which will absolutely occur if apps are hard killed. Any disucssion around this topic should reference Crash-only Software [0][1][2] and Micro Reboots [3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software

[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos-ix/crash-only-softwa...

[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/191059/

[3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers/...