SRE book notes: Simplicity
A software system can only be perfectly stable if it exists in a vacuum.
These are the notes from Chapter 9: Simplicity from the book Site Reliability Engineering, How Google Runs Production Systems.
This is a post of a series. The previous post can be seen here:
“The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.” — C.A.R. Hoare, Turing Award lecture
A software system can only be perfectly stable if it exists in a vacuum.
Unlike just about everything else in life, "boring" is actually a positive attribute when it comes to software! We don’t want our programs to be spontaneous and interesting; we want them to stick to the script and predictably accomplish their business goals.
“Boring” is not always a pejorative word. We should consider that a blessing in software engineering.
I never heard anyone complaining about maintaining “boring“ software. XD
when you consider a web service that’s expected to be available 24/7, to some extent, every new line of code written is a liability
French poet Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote, "perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer more to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away"
A small, simple API is usually also a hallmark of a well-understood problem.
It is much easier to measure and understand the impact of a single change rather than a batch of changes released simultaneously.