Key to Scalability: Distributed System Development

Today I came across this nice presentation about Google internal architecture practices by Jeff Dean.plenty of valuable advice and common sense (the most uncommon of all senses). I just wanted to highlight one item that I feel is a bit under-appreciated - on page 20 when he talks about key attributes of distributed system, there is on bullet point that reads:

Development cycles largely decoupled
    – lots of benefits: small teams can work independently

On one hand this is so obvious! After all they are "distributed" systems, how can they have coupled life cycle, on the other hand in so many people complain about lack of productivity and agility in large "distributed" systems. When you look closer, you find out that they have fairly decoupled system initally, more or less get the boundaries right, however they coupled the life cycles of all applications and services together !!

This means the whole organization releases with one giant push, the whole system all together. Everyone has to be on the same page, over time this unified "beat"brings down the boundaries and soon "the distributed" system becomes a monolith.

I will write a few more entries about the basic principles that enable true distributed (and autonomous) application development.



By the way,   Here is eBay version of scalability advice (a bit dated but updating it is in my todo list) by Dan Pritchet.