Martin Kleppmann

But then it has implications on the consistency model that you can get across different regions, for example.

So that's a trade-off that the book tries to make very explicit to help people reason that through of what is the right choice for them.

In terms of multi-cloud, for example, one thing that I've been

uh concerned about just in the last month really is european dependence on us cloud services yes so what if geopolitics was to go horribly wrong and tensions escalate and europe finds itself suddenly locked out of u.s cloud services i hope that doesn't happen i still think it's fairly unlikely

But it's no longer unthinkable.

And as a result, I, coming sort of from this European perspective, have been thinking a fair bit about how can we engineer systems to be resilient against that sort of thing.

And that's, you know, not just like a regional outage, but it's like a business risk, essentially.

And

multi-cloud sister setup could help mitigate against that sort of risk so that at least for example if one company locks you out then you could still have systems on on another company again that that's very much towards the expensive but high availability risk reduction end of the

have, you know, really critical workloads where they think this sort of geopolitical risk is a significant enough risk.

I think it's seriously worth considering that kind of setup.

I'm thinking that as engineers, we do have the responsibility because who else will do this?

Yes, totally.

But I totally agree with you as well that this...

Understanding what the risks are and communicating what the trade-offs are, I think, is going to be a core part of our role as engineers moving forward as well.

Maybe as AI writes more and more of our code, it's less about the details of how you express logic in a particular programming language and much more about those kinds of high-level trade-offs.

So I think achieving really high scale is still challenging because even though we have cloud services like object storage, for example, which provide you this very elastic storage model, at least you don't have to worry about capacity planning on your disks anymore and running out of disk space because those kinds of operational things, they're taken care of.

But if you need charting, for example, that's something that actually does reflect on the application code as well.

You can't really make that entirely transparent.

and so you are at a sufficiently large scale, the charting is required because a single machine is not powerful enough to process your workload, then I think even with cloud systems, you still have to do quite a bit of engineering thinking of how to realize that.