Oops! We use Distributed systems ...

Well... I am not a master in distributed computing ... But somehow from the day I heard the concept I have been skeptical about this ... May be because I have been a mainframe guy till I joined Amazon ...

mmm... I could shoot a mail to Bezos asking him to shift the Amazon data to a centralized system ... The first response would be “Dude ... who is going to pay the money?” ... I can show him the cheaper versions of Mainframe and some white papers , read only by their authors, which discuss how mainframe is cheaper than the distributed counterparts ... Again we will go deep to the amount of data stored by Amazon and I have to agree that distributed systems ARE cheaper ...

But I won't stop there ... I will question the reliability of the distributed systems and he will show the example of Google running successfully with distributed systems ... Wait wait ... How is Google related to reliability? ... Do I care if five sites are missing due to the outage of one box from the result consisting of some millions of sites ? But if Amazon loses the customer payment data due to cremation of one box, won't we care? Yeah... You will have replication ... then I will question the synchronization ( One box says I bought for $25 and the other says I bought for $5) and we will talk about the mechanisms for synch and I will give the extreme test cases ...

Then we will talk about flexibility ... I will laugh at them for having the same data in six boxes , each partitioned by a different key, just to handle 6 WHERE clauses ... And they will laugh that the hardware is so cheap that adding a box is having a cup of coffee ...

Ooph! This can go on but I am sure that everyone except me here believes in distributed systems than their own religion ... I am sure that I will move from my side to their side ... It will be interesting to know what is going to attract me to the distributed world ?