[mmt]

> There's all kinds of reasons this is necessary and there's all kinds of reasons why provising a new hardware server, blasting a Linux distro on to it, and just running your server is a bad idea. By no means am I proposing we need to go back to some glorious past, where losing a single hard drive sector means "oh well, guess the database is gone! recovery plan? Our recovery plan is to not need the database anymore!" I'm just saying, it's crazy to think this is all getting simpler. Try looking at this through the eyes of a fresh grad sometime.

Those "all kinds of reasons" aren't necessarily valid, though, because it's not actually possible to go back to that caricature of the past that you describe.

The reason it's not possible is that some things actually have gotten simpler, at least from a user's perspective.

Automatic bad-block relocation has been standard for effectively forever. Even line-speed hardware RAID has been affordable for so long that it's not even a question. Hardware, in general, is routinely villified as being a nightmare, when the reality is that it's boringly reliable and, more importantly, has predictable enough failure rates that there are simple, standard engineering solutions around the failures (often already baked in).

That "inflection point" may well just end up being peeling away all the abstraction layers to discover that simplicity underneath works just fine, since we don't live in the 20th century any more.