Throwing the baby out with the bathwater (No, you’re not Google, but why does this matter?)
It was quite difficult to prepare a tub full of bath water at many points in recent history (and it probably still is in some many parts of the world). First, there was the water itself—if you do not have plumbing, then the water must be manually transported, one bucket at a time, from a stream, well, or pump, to the tub. The result, of course, would be someone who was sweaty enough to need the forthcoming bath. Then there is the warming of the water. Shy of building a fire under the tub itself, how can you heat enough water quickly enough to make the eventual bathing experience? According to legend, this resulted in the entire household using the same tub of water to bathe. The last to bathe was always the smallest, the baby. By then, the water would be murky with dirt, which means the child could not be seen in the tub. When the tub was thrown out, then, no-one could tell if the baby was still in there.
But it doesn’t take a dirty tub of water to throw the baby out with the bath. All it really takes is an unwillingness to learn from the lessons of others because, somehow, you have convinced yourself that your circumstances are so different there is nothing to learn. Take, for instance, the constant refrain, “you are not Google.”
I should hope not.
But this phrase, or something similar, is often used to say something like this: you don’t have the problems of any of the hyperscalers, so you should not look to their solutions to find solutions for your problems. An entertaining read on this from a recent blog:
There is a lot of truth here—you should never choose a system or solution because it solves someone else’s problem. Do not deploy Kafka if you you need the scale Kafka represents. Maybe you don’t need four links between every pair of routers “just to be certain you have enough redundancy.”
On the other hand, there is a real danger here of throwing the baby out with the bathwater—the water is murky with product and project claims, so just abandon the entire mess. To see where the problem is here, let’s look at another large scale system we don’t think about very much any longer: the NASA space program from the mid-1960’s. One of the great things the folks at NASA have always liked to talk about is all the things that came out of the space program. Remember Tang? Or maybe not. It really wasn’t developed for the space program, and it’s mostly sugar and water, but it was used in some of the first space missions, and hence became associated with hanging out in space.
There are a number of other inventions, however, that really did come directly out of research into solving problems folks hanging out in space would have, such as the space pen, freeze-dried ice cream, exercise machines, scratch-resistant eyeglass lenses, cameras on phones, battery powered tools, infrared thermometers, and many others.
Since you are not going to space any time soon, you refuse to use any of these technologies, right?
Do not be silly. Of course you still use these technologies. Because you are smart enough not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
You should apply the same level of care to the solutions Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and the other hyperscalers. Not everything is going to fit in your environment, of course. On the other hand, some things might fit. And regardless of whether any particular technology fits or not, you can still learn something about how systems work by considering how they are building things to scale to their needs. You can adopt operational processes that make sense based on what they have learned. You can pick out technologies and ways of thinking that make sense.
No, you’re (probably not) Google. On the other hand, we are all building complex networks. The more we can learn from those around us, the better what we build will be. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.