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Time and again clients approach my colleagues and me with the request that they want to break up their monolith into microservices and they ask us how to do this best. Apparently, they are convinced that breaking up the monolith into microservices will solve some big problems they had for a long time.

Recently, I had two experiences within a few days that made me think regarding system dependability. In both situations, the systems acted detached from their surrounding reality and thus became confusing or even annoying – even if it would have been easy for them to detect their reality detachment.

About a decade ago, Jeffrey Dean and Luiz André Barroso published their IMO great article “The tail at scale” in the Communications of the ACM ¹. The article dives into the topic of latency tail-tolerance.

In the previous post, we identified time as our most precious resource. We saw that we are always confronted with a lot of tasks and expectations of other people. We also discussed that quite some of them turn out not to have any value for us or other people we care about. I call such tasks time killers.

This is my 100th blog post and the first post, I release in 2023. I would like to use this post to write about something more general for a change. I would like to write about time.