[intelVISA]

Distributed systems always ends up a dumping ground of failed tech solutions to deep org dysfunction.

Weak tech leadership? Let's "fix" that with some microservices.

Now it's FUBAR? Conceal it with some cloud native horrors, sacrifice a revolving door of 'smart' disempowered engineers to keep the theater going til you can jump to the next target.

Funny because dis sys is pretty solved since Lamport, 40+ years ago.

[whstl]

I suffered through this in two companies and man, it isn't easy.

First one was a multi-billion-Unicorn had everything converted to microservices, with everything customized in Kubernetes. One day I even had to fix a few bugs in the service mesh because the guy who wrote it left and I was the only person not fighting fires able to write the language it was in. I left right after the backend-of-the-frontend failed to sustain traffic during a month where they literally had zero customers (Corona).

At the second one there was a mandate to rewrite everything to microservices and it took another team 5 months to migrate a single 100-line class I wrote into a microservice. It just wasn't meant to be. Then the only guy who knows how the infrastructure works got burnout after being yelled at too many times and then got demoted, and last I heard is at home with depression.

Weak leadership doesn't even begin to describe it, especially the second.

But remembering it is a nice reminder that a job is just a means of getting a payment.

[rbjorklin]

Would you mind sharing some more specific information/references to Lamport’s work?

[vitus]

The three big papers: clocks [0], Paxos [1], Byzantine generals [2].

[0] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf

[1] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf

[2] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/byz.pdf

Or, if you prefer wiki articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

I don't know that I would call it "solved", but he certainly contributed a huge amount to the field.

[madhadron]

Lamport's website has his collected works. The paper to start with is "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system." Read it closely all the way to the end. Everyone seems to miss the last couple sections for some reason.