81 lines
3.9 KiB
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81 lines
3.9 KiB
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From fork-admin@xent.com Tue Oct 8 10:56:42 2002
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Tue, 8 Oct 2002 02:19:12 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: why is decentralization worth worrying about?
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From: Rohit Khare <khare@alumni.caltech.edu>
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To: fork@example.com
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Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 17:09:00 -0700
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Why am I so passionate about decentralization? Because I believe some of
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today<EFBFBD>s most profound problems with networked applications are caused by
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centralization.
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Generically, a centralized political or economic system permits only one
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answer to a question, while decentralization permits many separate
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agents to hold different opinions of the same matter. In the specific
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context of software, centralized variables can only contain one valid
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value at a time. That limits us to only representing information A)
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according to the beliefs of a single agency, and B) that changes more
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slowly than it takes to propagate. Nevertheless, centralization is the
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basis for today<61>s most popular architectural style for developing
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network applications: client-server interaction using request-response
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communication protocols.
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I believe these are profound limitations, which we are already
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encountering in practice. Spam, for example, is in the eye of the
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beholder, yet our email protocols and tools do not acknowledge the
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separate interests of senders and receivers. Slamming, for another,
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unfairly advantages the bidder with the lowest-latency connection to a
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centralized auction server. Sharing ad-hoc wireless networks is yet a
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third example of decentralized resource allocation. Furthermore, as
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abstract as centralization-induced failures might seem today, these
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limits will _not_ improve as the cost of computing, storage, and
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communication bandwidth continue to plummet. Instead, the speed of light
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and human independence constitute _fundamental_ limits to centralized
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information representation, and hence centralized software architecture.
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