Book: Designing Data-Intensive Applications Ch: 1. Reliable, Scalable and Maintainable Applications

[itsyme]

Book: Designing Data-Intensive Applications Chapter: 1. Reliable, Scalable and Maintainable Applications

Summary:

This chapter talks about how modern applications are becoming more data-intensive rather than compute-intensive. It also defines reliability, scalability and maintainability more concretely, which are terms that are commonly thrown about when we talk about applications today.

Definitions:

• Reliability: A system should continue to work correctly even in the face of adversity
• Scalability: As the system grows, there should be reasonable ways of dealing with that growth
• Maintainability: Over time, many different people will work on the system, and they should all be able to work on it productively

It also goes into more detail for each term about the factors that affect them and how to potentially improve in each area

• Reliability
  • Hardware Faults
  • Fixed by
    • Redundancy of hardware components
    • Prioritise flexibility and elasticity over single-machine reliability
  • Software Errors
  • Caused by
    • Software makes some kind of assumption about its environment that stops being true
  • Human Errors
  • Caused by
    • Unreliable humans
  • Fixed by
    • Designing systems in a way that minimises opportunities for error
    • Decoupling places where people make the most mistakes from places where they can cause failures
    • Test thoroughly
    • Setting up quick, easy recovery
    • Setting up detailed and clear monitoring
    • Implementing good management practices
• Scalability
  • Measuring Load
  • Load parameters are dependent on the architecture of the system
  • Measuring Performance
  • Should look at percentiles rather than average
  • Coping with Load
  • Discussion between Scaling up vs Scaling out
• Maintainability
  • Operability: Making it easy for operations teams to keep the system running smoothly
  • Simplicity: Making it easy for new engineers to understand the system
  • Evolvability: Making it easy for engineers to make changes to the system in the future

My thoughts: The first chapter of the book was really interesting to me by exposing the topics that would be covered in more detail in the rest of the book. Defining the common terms of Reliability, Scalability and Maintainability concretely was helpful as someone who desires to create applications that exhibit these traits as now I am more able to tell when an application is in the right direction of reaching these states. It also exposed the complexity and how much consideration I have to put in to create an application that meets those standards and is not something that occurs by chance. This chapter has made me excited to continue reading the book to explore patterns and techniques that can help me achieve these goals in different types of systems.

[kevin9foong]

this is an awesome book!

[kaixin-hc]

oh my gosh, I was reading that too!