It’s always nice to get an Ebay perspective on things – especially when you totally agree with what is being said. For a long time I have felt that if we really want to embrace the power of large scale distributed systems we have to accept that we just do not know what is going on – life is non-determinstic, messy, chaotic and generally random. Most tech orientated people are used to thinking in a single linear fashion. First the processor does this, then it does that. Nice – but not the way the world works. Things actually happen at the same time. Just not neccasarily on your processor or in your address space. For many people dealing with that is a problem and something that should be somehow hidden away or, at the very least, forced into a 2PC harness. That might work in a small system but not when you reach internet scale systems. Forget all about a linear world and move to thinking about multiple agents doing multiple things at the same time.

This is a thought process that is going to increasingly dominant the way we build systems.