Refer Waldo, et al (http://research.sun.com/techrep/1994/smli_tr-94-29.pdf): “There are fundamental differences between the interactions of distributed objects and the interactions of non-distributed objects. Further, work in distributed object-oriented systems that is based on a model that ignores or denies these differences is doomed to failure, and could easily lead to an industry-wide rejection of the notion of distributed object-based systems.”

RAPS of RACS enchant the developer into the very ignorance so described. If they are lucky enough to have a skilled, experienced practitioner cogniscant of the pitfalls, such as yourself, they may very well indeed be able to successfully spend the copious amounts of funds and time required to make it work properly. The vast majority do not.

a) still hasn’t answered the question as to why these massively over-controlled clustering beasts are needed (which they aren’t if you don’t have state in the middle tiers)

b) only points out systems that have massive financial reserves

c) doesn’t actually point out how or why those systems use a cluster (or farms of clusters)

d) must never have used a web browser to use, apart from the most massively scaled system on the planet (being the WWW itself), one of the most well-known non-clustered but very scaled-out information retrieval system: www.google.com

Thanks, Josh.

Code I (personally) wrote runs the New York Stock Exchange, the Swiss Exchange, the French (soon to be half of Europe) air traffic control system, the US Navy AEGIS, the core of Microsoft’s clustering system for the Vista release and the fault-tolerance mechanism in IBM Websphere. I guess these aren’t real systems.

Which is the real-man’s solution you had in mind?

Ken

Wrt a monitoring and management solution, this makes a whole lot of sense, actually. We miss many opportunities to (let our systems) handle failures in a clever way by not having sufficient info at crucial moments during runtime. We still rely on human experts using expertise and intuition (sometimes looking for the needle in the haystack and almost always after the fact/failure) to keep complex, highly distributed systems running. There’s got to be a better way - and IMHO it starts with better/different monitoring and management.