I'm glad that they improved their delivery, but one thing I find frustrating about our industry is how often we all seem to be reinventing the wheel. I mean, there are tons of well-described load balancing algorithms with various pros/cons. From the article it sounds like they just figured out their load balancing algorithm through trial and error, rather than researching load balancing algorithms first, then tweaking them based on real world performance.
The "we need to keep load on providers nearly even for business/political reasons" constraint is fairly unique.
From a purely technical perspective, you would just distribute requests inversely proportional to response time. Probably under low load, one provider would get all the requests, and only in an outage or overload scenario would the other provider take the rest.
> The "we need to keep load on providers nearly even for business/political reasons" constraint is fairly unique.
Where did that constraint come from? Did I miss it in the article? Their initial approach, after all, had all of their load going to a single provider.
From the article: "If we ended up sending only a small number of messages through one provider over the long run, they might not be massively incentivised to be a provider in the future."
Gotta keep the service provider happy to ensure they still go along with the program.
> I'm glad that they improved their delivery, but one thing I find frustrating about our industry is how often we all seem to be reinventing the wheel
The problem is you pick a SMS aggregator. They all tell you they have global coverage, and direct routes. They all tell you that their routing algorithm is the best of all the aggregators. And they're all full of BS.
If they weren't full of BS, I wouldn't have had a nice job managing verification code sending for a big messaging company though, so I guess it worked out for me. :P If SMS worked in general, the messaging company probably wouldn't have existed.
To be fair, what they ended up with seems far from a standard round robin system, and the amount of manual tweaking they acknowledge doing indicates it’s more complicated than picking an algorithm in a textbook.
Neigher. Focus on achieved business outcomes instead.
"Scaled GOV.UK Notify to 15 messages per second, ensuring reliable and timely delivery of 2FA codes and flood emergency warnings."
"Developed and researched" tells me you did something interesting but I can't tell if it was resume padding or real work. If you can't articulate why, that's a red flag. A good hiring manager should be able to detect resume padding and avoid hiring people that waste company resources on pet projects.
This is the stuff most of us have to deal on daily basis. Do I just google the it and move on, or maybe I should try to come up with it my self? Every time I google, I don't feel any good at all.In fact,I don't feel anything.When I come up with some solution myself,It elevates my motivation and I always learn something new. As a manager though,I sometimes allow to do this stuff,while on other occasions I specifically tell not to spend time on some creative stuff and just get something off the shelve.
