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Deb Chachra's "How infrastructure works" page 209 with a yellow highlighted section that reads "What's common to all of these approaches - robustness, redundancy, and resilience, especially through diversity and decentralization - is that they are not efficient. Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there have to be some unused resources to draw on when the unexpected happens,"

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Deb Chachra's "How infrastructure works" page 209 with a yellow highlighted section that reads "What's common to all of these approaches - robustness, redundancy, and resilience, especially through diversity and decentralization - is that they are not efficient. Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there have to be some unused resources to draw on when the unexpected happens,"
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Daniel (mrtazz@chaos.social)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Jan-2024 01:32:03 JST Daniel

This passage from @debcha's "How Infrastructure works" is such a truth that often gets forgotten or ignored on the hunt for profit. It's a very familiar and recurring theme in resilience engineering texts and research. And it also rings true for me in this current trend of continuous layoffs that take more and more slack and capacity out of tech systems being maintained (in addition to the human cost) as remaining humans need to do more work in the same amount of time.

In conversation about 10 months ago from chaos.social permalink