There are a few timeless truths of software development that are near-universally accepted, and have become the basis for many a witty saying over the years. For starters, there's Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics, which states:
Once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a bigger can.
And Weinberg's Second Law, which postulates that,
If builders built buildings the way that programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
There is true brilliance in this timeless wit, enjoyed and appreciated by generation after generation of software developers.
The largest set of challenges that the modern programmer faces, and thus the source of most of the wit that we as programmers revel in, revolves around the seemingly boundless growth of complexity. Hardware becomes more complex. Operating systems become more complex. Programming languages and APIs become more complex. And the applications that we build and evolve, become more and more complex.
The complexity of a system always seems to hover ever so slightly on the far side of manageable, just slightly over the edge of the cliff. And while our work reality is a world full of complexity—or perhaps because of that complexity—we gravitate toward the pristine and the simple. While our day-to-day lives may be focused on diagnosing failures in production systems, our guiding light is the concept of continuous availability. While we may have to manually correct data when things go wrong, our aspirations remain with data integrity and information reliability. While the complexity of the legacy applications that we manage forces us to adopt the most expensive means of adding capacity, our higher thoughts are focused on commodity scale-out and linear scalability. And while the complex, layered, and often twisted system designs result in hopelessly slow responses to user actions, we fundamentally believe that users should experience near-instant responses for almost any conceivable action they take.
In a word, we believe in the ilities.
Availability. Reliability. Scalability. Performance. These are attributes that we wish to endow each and every one of our systems with. If a system lacks continuous availability, its users will be directly impacted by failures within the system. If a system lacks information reliability, then users will never know if the information they are using can be trusted. If a system lacks scalability, its growing popularity will overwhelm and kill it—it will fail just as it begins to succeed! If a system lacks performance, it will inflict a dose of pain upon its users with each and every interaction.
We wish to achieve these ilities because we wish for our labors to be beneficial to others, and we hope that the value that we provide through these systems endures far longer than the passing whims and fads of technology and industry.
Perhaps no greater revolution has occurred in our industry than the World Wide Web. Suddenly, the systems we provide had a limitless audience, with instant access to the latest and greatest versions of our software. Users are so accustomed to instant responses from one application that failure to achieve the same will cause them to quickly abandon another. Downtime no longer represents an inconvenience—for major websites, their online foibles have become headline news on the printed pages of the Wall Street Journal!
At the same time, the competitive landscape has forced companies, and thus their IT departments, to act and react far more quickly than before. The instant popularity of a particular good, service, or website can bring mind-boggling hordes of unexpected—though generally not undesired—users. Companies must be able to roll out new features and capabilities quickly, to grow their capacity dynamically in order to match the increase in users, and to provide instantaneous responsiveness with correct and up-to-date information to each and every user.
These are the systems that Oracle Coherence was designed to enable. These are the systems that this book will help you build.
If there was only one piece of advice that I could instill into the mind of a software architect or developer responsible for one of these systems, it would be this: architecture matters, and in systems of scale and systems that require availability, architecture matters absolutely! Failure to achieve a solid architecture will doom in advance any hope of significant scalability, and will leave the effects of failure within the system to pure chance.
No amount of brilliant programming can make up for a lack of architectural foresight. Systems do not remain available by accident, nor do they scale by accident. Achieving information reliability in a system that remains continuously available and provides high performance under varying degrees of load and scale is an outcome that results only when a systematic and well-conceived architecture has been laid down. Availability, reliability, scalability, and performance must be the core tenets of an architecture, and they must be baked into and throughout that architecture.
If there were a second piece of advice that I could confer, it would be this: as a craftsman or craftswoman, know your tools, and know them well. Using Oracle Coherence as part of a system does not ensure any of the ilities by itself; it is simply a powerful tool for simultaneously achieving those ilities as part of a great architecture. This book is an effort to condense a huge amount of experience and knowledge into a medium of transfer that you can rehydrate into instant knowledge for yourself.
And the last piece of advice is this: don't believe it until you see it; make sure that you push it until it fails. While testing, if you don't overload the system until it breaks, then you can't be certain that it will work. If you don't pull the plug while it's running, then you can't be certain that it will handle failure when it truly matters. Don't be satisfied until you understand the limits of your systems, and until you appreciate and understand what lies beyond those boundaries.