Originally published July 2015 In 2002, Professor Enrico Zaninotto, Dean of Economics at the University of Trento, gave a keynote at the Extreme Programming conference. It was the clearest technical talk I have ever seen, even though it was delivered by a non-programmer in an unfamiliar language. What set the talk apart was the clarity and depth of the thought behind it.
I think of a complex system as one for which the outputs are _incongruent_ with the inputs. That is to say: it's impossible to attribute outputs or outcomes to the interactions among and between inputs within the system. A system can be made _less_ complex by understanding and modeling interactions therein. Describing a system as complex doesn't imply sophistication; rather, it's a bad thing and should be addressed.
Wouldn’t it be great if the people using the system could decide to reverse or opt-out of some new feature that public web companies provide?
I’m reading Johann Hari’s book “Stolen Focus” and the data he presents on the epidemic of attention span decline makes me wish I could turn off the attention grabbing features being added to all the social media and commerce systems.
Sorry if this is off topic or a stretch of intent but maybe it will spark some interest.
You wrote that the complexity head to cut off— if you’re Facebook— is the irreversability head, because the other 3 are not approachable. Is that true of any multi-datacenter-scale computing organization? Or was Facebook different because it was harder to predict its future feature set and scale? Do other computing organizations have hope of attacking state, interdependencies, or uncertainty?
Taming Complexity with Reversibility
After reading the blog, I realized that Cloud Native is primarily associated with irreversibility.
I think of a complex system as one for which the outputs are _incongruent_ with the inputs. That is to say: it's impossible to attribute outputs or outcomes to the interactions among and between inputs within the system. A system can be made _less_ complex by understanding and modeling interactions therein. Describing a system as complex doesn't imply sophistication; rather, it's a bad thing and should be addressed.
Wouldn’t it be great if the people using the system could decide to reverse or opt-out of some new feature that public web companies provide?
I’m reading Johann Hari’s book “Stolen Focus” and the data he presents on the epidemic of attention span decline makes me wish I could turn off the attention grabbing features being added to all the social media and commerce systems.
Sorry if this is off topic or a stretch of intent but maybe it will spark some interest.
Any chance that there is somewhere video of profesor Enrico Zaninotto keynote talk?
You wrote that the complexity head to cut off— if you’re Facebook— is the irreversability head, because the other 3 are not approachable. Is that true of any multi-datacenter-scale computing organization? Or was Facebook different because it was harder to predict its future feature set and scale? Do other computing organizations have hope of attacking state, interdependencies, or uncertainty?