From: clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP

On 2025-11-03, Arne Vajhøj  wrote:
>
> Mainframes were unique in last century regarding integrity, availability
> and performance but not today.
>
> Standard distributed environment, load sharing (horizontal scaling)
> applications, standard RDBMS with transaction and XA transaction
> support, auto scaling VM or container solutions, massive scaling
> capable NoSQL databases.
>
> It can be made to work.
>

It can also be made to _appear_ to work. And probably will, at least in
the short term.

> It can also be made not to work, but ....
>

I was aware this was going on, but not to this level. So, in the name of
{short term whatever}, yet another chunk of the critical infrastructure
that keeps this planet running is in the process of being added to the
massive monoculture that is a single point of failure when a vulnerability
or flaw is discovered. :-(

People thought the public cloud service failures were bad. That's going
to be nothing compared to what happens if an enemy (state level or otherwise)
decides to cripple our way of life and now has massive nice juicy targets
to take down, all of which are running the same technology infrastructure.

These people are thinking about how they can make profit for their companies
in the short term. I'm thinking that perhaps society should be forcing them
instead to design things so that they can keep society running even when
they are under attack.

A society that allows critical systems to move towards a single monoculture
without any backup systems or other redundancy is a society that has lost
the plot.

When the STS computers were being designed, NASA went through a massive
formal process to validate and verify them. Even after all that, they
_still_ added a 5th computer system designed by a different team in case
something happened to the primary systems that they had missed.

If you are important enough to provide services that help keep society
running, then you should be forced to do the same. The question isn't
about how much this extra infrastructure costs, but is instead about the
cost to society if you don't do it.

I've been thinking quite a bit recently about just how bad monocultures
and short term thinking can be from a society being able to continue
functioning point of view. Just look at the massive damage done by
attacks on major companies here in the UK over the last year, all of
which should not have had single points of failure like that. :-(

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)