As someone who helped design, then manage a massive NoSQL store which hundreds of terabytes of data, of which most of it was hot, I’ll humbly disagree and say it’s not necessarily as bad as you make it sound.
Did we have someone who managed that system? Sometimes, but mostly it just did it’s own thing. We ironically invested way more time on our MySQL database over the years because we couldn’t get that to scale the way we wanted to, but I think that was specific to a problem we were having.
Did we later invest a lot of time in that system (the NoSQL one)? Yes, because it was very cost effective for us to do so. At certain scale throwing people at optimization problems can pay huge dividends. But, this can be said of most infrstracture. It’s usually worth revisiting every year or two and seeing how what you can squeeze out.
Did we have churning CPU, infinitely expanding disk, replication issues, and more? Sure, but not very commonly and mostly it was fairly easily resolved. More importantly though, it was a solid system that was the underpinning of a colossal system, and it behaved admiraly more than 99.9% of the time.
Will most projects benefit from a hugely distributed KV store? Nope. But I’m still glad they exist!
Did we have someone who managed that system? Sometimes, but mostly it just did it’s own thing. We ironically invested way more time on our MySQL database over the years because we couldn’t get that to scale the way we wanted to, but I think that was specific to a problem we were having.
Did we later invest a lot of time in that system (the NoSQL one)? Yes, because it was very cost effective for us to do so. At certain scale throwing people at optimization problems can pay huge dividends. But, this can be said of most infrstracture. It’s usually worth revisiting every year or two and seeing how what you can squeeze out.
Did we have churning CPU, infinitely expanding disk, replication issues, and more? Sure, but not very commonly and mostly it was fairly easily resolved. More importantly though, it was a solid system that was the underpinning of a colossal system, and it behaved admiraly more than 99.9% of the time.
Will most projects benefit from a hugely distributed KV store? Nope. But I’m still glad they exist!