God Objects Considered Harmful
Every software developer has run into “god objects”—some data structure or database that every process must access no matter what it is doing. Creating god objects in software is considered an anti-pattern—something you should not do. Perhaps the most apt description of the god object I’ve seen recently is you ask for a banana, and you get the gorilla as well.
We seem to have a deep desire to solve all the complexity of modern networks through god objects. There was ATM, which was going to solve all our networking problems by allowing the edge device (or a centralized controller) to control the path its traffic takes through the network. There is LISP, which is going to solve every mapping and tunneling/transport problem in the entire networking world (including mobility and security). There is SDN, which is going to solve everything by pushing it all into a controller.
And now there is BGP, which can be a link state protocol (LSVR), the ideal DC fabric control plane, the ideal interdomain protocol, the ideal IGP … a sort-of distributed god object that solves everything, everywhere, all the time (life in the fast lane…).
The problem is, a bunch of people are asking for different bananas, and what we keep getting is the gorilla.
A lot of this is our fault. We crave simplicity so much that we are willing to believe just about anyone, or anything, that promises to solve all the problems we face in building and operating networks in a simple and easy way. The truth is, however, there are no simple solutions to hard problems—solving hard problems requires complex solutions.
Okay, so we can intuitively know god objects are bad, but why? Because they are too complex to really understand, and therefore they cannot be truly operated, nor can you effectively troubleshoot them. There are too many unintended consequences, too many places where you cannot understand the relationship between this and that.
To put this in more human terms—there are many people in the modern world who think that if they just have enough data, they will understand people well enough to operate and troubleshoot them like some kind of machine. Sorry to tell you this—humans are just too complex, and human social institutions, being made up of people (well, duh!), are way more complex than even the most intelligent artificial intelligence can ever “understand.”
We need to fall out of love with the utopia of the god object for once and for all. We need to go back to building simpler systems that solve one or two problems well, and then combining these into intelligible solutions that can be understood, managed, and repaired.
But the move back towards real simplicity has to begin with you.