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This line of "what if an asteroid hits the primary & DR data centers in the same microsecond" thinking is why we settled on running our product on 1 VM with SQLite in-proc.

After taking our customers through this same kind of apocalyptic rabbit hole conversation, they tend to agree with this architecture decision.

The cost of anticipating the .00001% that might never come is completely drowned out by the massive, daily 99%-certain headache that is managing a convoluted, multi-cloud cluster.

Many times the business owners will get the message and finally reveal that they have always had access to a completely ridiculous workaround involving literal paper & pen that is just as feasible in 2023 as it was in the 18th century.



In my experience the customers, and even the POs, are the easy ones to convince. “We get 99% of the uptime for 30% of the price? Great!”

It’s the resume-driven mid dev in the next office you’ve got to watch out for.


or the dev who spent a few nights and weekends rescuing the system after one of those 1% failures the customer, as it turns out, has no patience for at all


Disaster recovery is just one of many things that is much simpler in non-distributed systems.

You seem to be confusing a system that produces bad results 1% of the time with a system that's down 1% of the time. If you can only write the first kind of non-distributed system, you're in for a bad trip if you try to write a distributed equivalent.




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