It's a simple but unpleasant truth, what annoys me the most in our industry lately? If someone says 'we just scaled' and that's it. It somehow sounds like a magic spell to me, after which there's no need to explain what's going on inside. For now, it looks like this, but the situation is clearly not final here.
You may disagree, but the system is growing, the load increases tenfold, everyone is in a panic, and then some architect comes in and calmly says, 'But we just attached Plasma, now everything will be fine.' And everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Then, three months later, something crashes, and it starts, 'Why are our data getting lost somewhere? Why is latency jumping? Why does no one understand how this works? You can keep asking many similar questions, let's take a closer look at everything.
Let's start with something quite interesting, nobody just wants to dig deeper. Because 'we scaled', which means this is no longer our area of responsibility. Responsibility seems to shift somewhere aside - to the team that built that layer, to the vendor, to the open-source project, to 'the peculiarities of distributed systems'. Anywhere, just not on ourselves. Probably a classic scenario that everyone is used to.
Without pathos, we are gradually getting used to not understanding how the system under the hood works and that's okay. Because of the scale, because of the complexity, because 'everyone does it'. But this is a trap. The more abstractions we stack on top of each other, the easier it is to say, 'But I don't know how it works there, I'm just a user of this layer.' I don't want to delve into this as it's a separate conversation.
And then an incident happens. And it turns out that no one is ready to take responsibility for what is really happening. Because everyone thought that someone else had already thought about it.
I like the idea of scaling. Very much. But when it becomes an excuse not to delve into the details, then something is already off. Because at some point you stop being an engineer and become just 'a user of a convenient service'. And if that service breaks, you won't even know from which side to approach.
Maybe I'm too picky about everything. But it seems to me that when we allow ourselves to say 'we just scaled' instead of 'we did this and that, and here are the compromises we consciously accepted' without realizing that we are slowly losing something important. Control. Understanding. And, most importantly, the feeling that we are still responsible for what we built. So far, it looks like this. But the situation is clearly not final.
So the next time someone says 'but we just...' ask them, so what exactly does 'just' mean for you? And watch carefully how long they can respond without pauses and 'well, you know... it's standard'. That's why I say this is the case when it's worth just observing.@Plasma #Plasma $XPL
