> [In the mid-2000's], a lot of BigIron(TM) vendors advertised achieving five-9s by replacing hardware while the OS remained running and continuing service... A decade later I look back with deep surprise that we didn't think to abstract out the service instead of the hardware.... Micro services and AWS have taken five-9s in a different direction.
In the mid-2000s, enterprises were (and in many cases, still are) running proprietary software with proprietary RPC protocols that had no available source code or other means of modification, and most had no support for application-level high availability, access control, or any other operational quality-of-life feature that people take for granted today. Rather, that functionality was handled at the infrastructure level, through things like the aforementioned Big Iron.
The world looks different today, but those machines made sense for the environment at the time.
I think it kind of makes sence in general, and the obly questuon is whether it could be achieved at lower cost. Complexity of Todays commodity machines is conparable to big iron kf yesteryear
In the mid-2000s, enterprises were (and in many cases, still are) running proprietary software with proprietary RPC protocols that had no available source code or other means of modification, and most had no support for application-level high availability, access control, or any other operational quality-of-life feature that people take for granted today. Rather, that functionality was handled at the infrastructure level, through things like the aforementioned Big Iron.
The world looks different today, but those machines made sense for the environment at the time.