The data center when you're 20, 30 and 40

I find it fascinating to contrast the attitudes of engineers and software execs when it comes to building data centers to run critical software. My non-scientific classification:

When you’re in your twenties your mindset is: I’ll build some cool software, compile it and then deploy it. Where? Free hosting, or just slap on a machine for each kind of server that I need (hmmm… what if I just put every one of them in ONE machine…)

When you’re in your thirties you’ve seen your share of fires and had to deal with long outages, and your mindset is: two of each. I’ll have no single point of failure. I’ll build in redundancy. But you’re still running a ‘Mickey Mouse’ operation (Ahmed’s term).

When you’re in your forties you’ve got battle scars and you’ve been burnt before, and your mindset is: EMC, RAC, Clusterware, active active replication… you have overprovisioned both your hardware and your team and practiced, practiced, practiced.

I’m 34 and I’m trying to act like I’m 44 without waiting ten years. But oh the scars…how much they hurt.