[AusNOG] "Simple Systems Have Less Downtime"

[Mark Smith]

On Thu, 5 Mar 2020, 14:07 Bevan Slattery, <bevan at slattery.net.au> wrote:

> There was a whole PhD paper demonstrating why planes with two engines were
> safer than planes with four due to risk of catastrophic failure having four
> engines/and complexity that outweighed the additional redundancy it
> provided.
>


Having realised that "unnecessary complexity is the enemy", after working
on both simple and complex networks and systems, I've been "collecting"
simplicity idioms:

"Less is more." - Bauhaus Movement.

"Complex equals more things that can break." - Anonymous on Slashdot.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when
there is nothing left to take away.” (in the context of aircraft design
coincidentally) - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey.

"As simple as possible but no simpler."

"In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing
left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - RFC1925.


Somewhere along the line I came across a theory that the Roman Empire
collapsed because of its complexity, and that continuing adding complexity
will unavoidably result in catastrophic collapse.

Looking that up, I came across this paper that suggests persistent,
determined and voluntary simplicity is the way to gain resilience and avoid
complexity collapse.

"Resilience through Simplification: Revisiting Tainter’s Theory of Collapse"
http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ResilienceThroughSimplificationSimplicityInstitute.pdf


Regards,
Mark.


>
> [b]
>
>
>
> *From: *AusNOG <ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net> on behalf of Mark Smith <
> markzzzsmith at gmail.com>
> *Date: *Thursday, 5 March 2020 at 1:05 pm
> *To: *AusNOG Mailing List <ausnog at ausnog.net>
> *Subject: *[AusNOG] "Simple Systems Have Less Downtime"
>
>
>
> This is excellent. About startups, however lots of parallels in network
> and network protocol architecture and design.
>
>
>
> Simple Systems Have Less Downtime
>
> https://www.gkogan.co/blog/simple-systems/
>
>
>
> Also cross over with RFC1925, "The Twelve Networking Truths", for those
> that may not be aware if it.
>
>
>
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925
>
>
>
> (RFC1925 might be the best RFC ever.)
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/attachments/20200305/a4e28223/attachment.html>