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.

Welcome to Assimilation Systems Limited

I’m Alan Robertson, founder of Assimilation Systems Limited – this is my first blog post about the company. Let’s start this first post with a little history of the project and the company.

I founded the Assimilation Project back in 2010, as a result of thinking about a really big supercomputer (over 2 million cores) I was working with which had a very unusual networking architecture. It was a very cool and odd computer. Along the way, I puzzled over how one could effectively monitor it in the presence of this non-traditional networking topology – without using the built-in monitoring hardware (which would be like cheating). After a while, I realized I knew how to make monitoring on normal computers scale in a way that seemed really interesting. Being a techie at heart, I was really jazzed and decided I had to implement it…