I recently read an article about Google’s new self-driving car, and I was intrigued by a reference to the requirement that the computer hardware and software running the car be completely resistant to failure. In so many words, a “blue screen of death” while in motion would probably lead to a deadly blue screen of death.
I believe hardware and software can be made 100% resilient to failure, so why, as infrastructure professionals, do we never witness a truly resilient system?
Well, we do. A few devices with resilient hardware and software systems are:
- Apollo 11
- My car
- TiVo systems (note, I did not say Comcast or FiOS DVRs)
- Calculators
When something works well, we should take the time to examine how to replicate the processes leading to a better deliverable. Everything we do should include “lesson learned,” and every lesson learned should result in a project to make things better. Problems will diminish and our focus will shift to developing value-added business processes, rather than fixing what is broken.
In an article called “The Infrastructure Economics Breakthrough,” in this month’s Wall Street & Technology, Howard Rubin posits that infrastructure professionals have yet to deliver high quality infrastructure for less money. The panacea of “scale” we all talk about has not been attained and we [infrastructure folks] prevent investment in business deliverables that could drive higher profits.
Maybe one of the reasons we can’t optimize the infrastructure is that we are too busy fixing the hardware and software designed to give us an optimized infrastructure. When was the last time you implemented something that didn’t require a fix, patch, or an “enhancement” to get it to work correctly? We all know not to implement a “zero point release” of a product. We will let someone else shake out the bugs, and only then will we consider planning for an implementation. That doesn’t sound productive, and you know someone is going through the pain of being the early adopter.
I have a solution. Let’s ask Sam Palmisano, Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt, Steve Ballmer, and other hardware/software CEO’s to drive cars with the hardware and software at the same level of quality at which they release their products. I bet they would think twice, and maybe we would see an improved focus on resilient systems.