Suggest modification to this talk

Title

Description

by Paul Hinze
Many of the greatest achievements in the history of computers are based on lies, or rather, the strategic sets of lies we generallly call “abstraction”. Operating systems lie to programs about hardware, multitasking systems lie to users about parallelism, Ruby lies to us about how easy it is to tell a CPU what to do… the list goes on and on.
One of the primary “strategic lies” of the internet is the presentation of each service as though it were a discrete, cohesive entity. When we use GitHub, we think of it as just “GitHub”, not a swarm of networked computers. This lie gives us the opportunity to build high availability applications: apps designed to never go down.
Let’s take a tour through the amazing stack of tools that helps us construct high availability applications. We’ll review some of the incredible technology underlying the internet: things like TCP, BGP, and DNS. Then we’ll talk about how these primitives combine into useful patterns at the application level. I hope you’ll leave with not only a renewed appreciation for the core innovations of the internet, but also some practical working knowledge of how to go about building and running a zero-downtime application.

Help us caption & translate this video!

http://amara.org/v/GVgo/

Date

Summarized using AI?

If this talk's summary was generated by AI, please check this box. A "Summarized using AI" badge will be displayed in the summary tab to indicate that the summary was generated using AI.

Show "Summarized using AI" badge on summary page

Summary

Markdown supported

The video titled "Smoke & Mirrors: The Primitives of High Availability" presented by Paul Hinze at the MountainWest RubyConf 2015 explores the concept of abstraction in computer science and its critical role in building highly available applications. The discussion initiates with the idea that abstraction allows computer systems to simplify complex realities through strategic 'lies', leading to practical implementations like the internet and high availability applications.

Key points include: 
- **Definition of Abstraction**: Abstraction is described as simplifying complexity to direct focus away from technical intricacies.
- **Web Request Breakdown**: Hinze breaks down a web request to GitHub, illustrating multiple underlying technologies such as DNS, TCP, and HTTP that contribute to the user experience without requiring users to understand the complexities involved.
- **High Availability Explained**: He emphasizes the importance of fault tolerance, stating that it involves anticipating and reacting to failures in a system.
- **Redundancy as a Primitive**: Redundancy is presented as a simple yet powerful form of fault tolerance, exemplified by modern servers using RAID systems and load balancing to handle potential failures smoothly.
- **Handling Stateful Services**: The challenges of redundancy in stateful services like databases are covered, where replication strategies are vital and trade-offs between consistency and performance must be considered.
- **Monitoring Systems**: Monitoring is crucial for identifying potential issues before they escalate into failures, thus maintaining system reliability.
- **Concluding Thoughts**: Hinze advises that designing highly available systems begins with recognizing that failures will occur and that systems should be structured accordingly. Therefore, high availability should be a fundamental consideration in technological decisions.
Overall, the talk emphasizes that understanding and preparing for potential failures will lead to more robust and reliable applications.

Cancel