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Every System is a Log: Avoiding coordination in distributed applications

https://restate.dev/blog/every-system-is-a-log-avoiding-coordination-in-distributed-applications/
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Excuse me for sounding rough, but - isn't this reinventing comp-sci, one step at a time?

I learned about distributed incrementally -monotonic logs back at the late 90s, with many other ways to do guaranteed transactional database actions. And I'm quite certain these must have been invented in the 50s or 60s, as these are the problems that early business computer users had: banking software. These are the techniques that were buried in legacy COBOL routines, and needed to be slowly replaced by robust Java core services.

I'm sure the Restate designers will have learned terribly useful insights in how to translate these basic principles into a working system with the complexities of today's hardware/software ecosystem.

Yet it makes me wonder if young programmers are only being taught the "build fast-break things" mentality and there are no longer SW engineers able to insert these guarantees into their systems from the beginning, by standing on the shoulders of the ancients that invented our discipline, so that their lore is actually used in practice? Or am I just missing something new in the article that describes some novel twist?

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