Heh, in my local developer community I have a bit of a reputation for being “the guy” to talk to about distributed systems. I’d done a bunch of work in the early days of the horizontal-scaling movement (vs just buying bigger servers) and did an M.Sc focused on distributed systems performance.
Whenever anyone would come and ask for help with a planned distributed system the first question I would always ask is: does this system actually need to be distributed?! In my 15 years of consulting I think the answer was only actually “yes” 2 or 3 times. Much more often than was helping them solve the performance problems in their single server system; without doing that they would usually just have ended up with a slow complex distributed system.
Whenever anyone would come and ask for help with a planned distributed system the first question I would always ask is: does this system actually need to be distributed?! In my 15 years of consulting I think the answer was only actually “yes” 2 or 3 times. Much more often than was helping them solve the performance problems in their single server system; without doing that they would usually just have ended up with a slow complex distributed system.
Edit: lol this paper was not popular in the Distributed Systems Group at my school: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...
“You can have a second computer once you’ve shown you know how to use the first one.”