On Thu, 5 Mar 2020, 14:07 Bevan Slattery, <be...@slattery.net.au> wrote:
> There was a whole PhD paper demonstrating why planes with two engines were > safer than planes with four due to risk of catastrophic failure having four > engines/and complexity that outweighed the additional redundancy it > provided. > Having realised that "unnecessary complexity is the enemy", after working on both simple and complex networks and systems, I've been "collecting" simplicity idioms: "Less is more." - Bauhaus Movement. "Complex equals more things that can break." - Anonymous on Slashdot. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (in the context of aircraft design coincidentally) - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey. "As simple as possible but no simpler." "In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - RFC1925. Somewhere along the line I came across a theory that the Roman Empire collapsed because of its complexity, and that continuing adding complexity will unavoidably result in catastrophic collapse. Looking that up, I came across this paper that suggests persistent, determined and voluntary simplicity is the way to gain resilience and avoid complexity collapse. "Resilience through Simplification: Revisiting Tainter’s Theory of Collapse" http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ResilienceThroughSimplificationSimplicityInstitute.pdf Regards, Mark. > > [b] > > > > *From: *AusNOG <ausnog-boun...@lists.ausnog.net> on behalf of Mark Smith < > markzzzsm...@gmail.com> > *Date: *Thursday, 5 March 2020 at 1:05 pm > *To: *AusNOG Mailing List <aus...@ausnog.net> > *Subject: *[AusNOG] "Simple Systems Have Less Downtime" > > > > This is excellent. About startups, however lots of parallels in network > and network protocol architecture and design. > > > > Simple Systems Have Less Downtime > > https://www.gkogan.co/blog/simple-systems/ > > > > Also cross over with RFC1925, "The Twelve Networking Truths", for those > that may not be aware if it. > > > > https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925 > > > > (RFC1925 might be the best RFC ever.) >
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