Getting the Big Picture – Conclusion
We’ve been considering how to determine system performance degradation in a distributed, service oriented world. We considered multi layered services, service oriented monitoring and sharded data monitoring. Today I want to talk about inconsistent performance.
One of the hardest bugs for any developer to track down is the inconsistent bug; the bug that is difficult to reproduce, only occurring under unique circumstances. With distributed systems these kinds of bugs are even more complicated to locate and nail down.
Historically we have experienced these kinds of bugs in the forms things like hardware beginning to fail or unique hardware configurations that don’t perform as expected.
In a modern distributed system you get inconsistent messages such as “Gatway Not Found” from a distributed service. Why is the gateway not found? There could be any number of reasons. Internet or network failure. Load Balancing failure. Host server failure.
The reality is that as our systems become more distributed our systems need to become more robust from the perspective of error handling. Failures are becoming harder to track, and are rapidly growing outside of our control. We need to be able to know when a layer is not performing to required specifications. In contrast, we need to be able to handle and recover from a failed service attempt, much like we handled database deadlock victims historically.
Are you getting the big picture? Share you experience by getting involved in the conversation below, or sending an email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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