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.

I did not yet write a lot about sustainability in this blog. However, I think it will become one of the mega-drivers of the upcoming years in IT. As a consequence, I think it is sensible to start pondering how to include sustainability into our daily work.

We have discussed the business case for resilient software design in my previous post. Let us assume, you have a budget and you know which are the most critical business processes/capabilities/interactions (whatever term suits your needs best) you need to secure, i.e., make more resilient.

The business case of resilience is a bit tricky. You find quite disparate forces at work: While some people tend to underrate the need and value of resilience a lot, other people find it hard to stop adding resilience measures. As so often, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.