This article comes from the Basho Blog. his is my favorite quote from the article, talking about some of the challenges that are faced in this space.
Immutable laws are not marketing. And therefore, marketing can’t release you from the bonds of immutable laws. You can’t solve the intractable problems of distributed systems so eloquently summarized with three letters – C-A-P – by Google’s cloud architect (and Basho Board member) Dr. Eric Brewer (a man both lauded and whose full impact on our world has not yet been reckoned), with specious claims about downloads and full consistency.
To wit:
- Memory is not storage.
- Trading the RDBMS world for uptime is hard. There are no half-steps. No transitional phases.
- The geometry of a spinning disk matters for your app. You can’t escape this.
- Your hardware RAID controller is not perfect. It screws things up and needs to be debugged.
- Replication between two data centers is hard, let alone replication between three or 15 data centers.
- Easily adding nodes to a cluster under load impacts performance for a period determined by the amount of data stored on the existing nodes and the load on the system…and the kind of servers you are using…and a dozen other things. It looks easy in the beginning.
- Craig
