The Incredible Power Of The Right Questions

The Incredible Power of Good Questions

There is incredible power in asking the right questions, and following the answers where they lead – especially when they lead to uncomfortable places.

As you probably remember, in March, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit Japan resulting in a massive tsunami which damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Some of the most serious damage occurred because there was no power to cool the reactor.

Scalability from Doing Nothing?

Scalability is the ability to respond gracefully to increased workload. When you have enough of it, life is good. When you have trouble scaling up and your workload goes up, as it inevitably does, life becomes complicated, sometimes miserable. In this blog post I tell you why doing nothing can be the best way to scale…

Simplicity Is King

We fill our lives with things designed to make them easier… In many cases, these things we get to make our lives easier wind up making it more complex. Nowhere is this more apparent than in IT. We have so many choices of ways to create services, to deploy them, and to manage them. I’ve been extensively involved with high-availability work since 1998. One of my mantras in high-availability is “Complexity is the Enemy of Reliability” – and so it is. If you add parts to a thing, more things will fail – period. In high-availability, we add high-availability software – which makes it more complex, and hence less reliable. But we get something back instead – improved availability.