{"id":270,"date":"2009-03-03T18:14:20","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T23:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/03\/vincents-notes-end-to-end-arguments-in-system-design\/"},"modified":"2009-03-03T18:14:22","modified_gmt":"2009-03-03T23:14:22","slug":"vincents-notes-end-to-end-arguments-in-system-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/03\/vincents-notes-end-to-end-arguments-in-system-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Vincent’s Notes: End To End Arguments in System Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Michael Tsai’s suggestion<\/a> I listened to the paper End-To-End Arugments in System Design<\/a><\/cite> while driving. (Fair warning: Since I was also driving while listening, I didn’t absorb everything as well as I should have.)<\/p>\n

The thrust of the paper is that you generally want to make your low level components (aka libraries) simpler then you think. Counter-intuitively, building extra reliability into a low-level component does not<\/em> (usually) make it easier to build a reliable application that uses the component. That’s because the application has to work around all sorts of other errors from different components. So it must have error handling code. Making one low level component “smarter” does not change this. But it does make the component more complex. And some of that complexity is duplicate code that does just what the application’s error handling code does.<\/p>\n

The “End to End” in the title of the paper is from a file transfer application having to do an “end to end” check to make sure that the files at both end of the transmission are the same.<\/p>\n

\n

Conclusions<\/h3>\n

End-to-end arguments are a kind of “Occam’s razor” when it comes to
\nchoosing the functions to be provided in a communication subsystem.
\nBecause the communication subsystem is frequently specified before
\napplications that use the subsystem are known, the designer may be
\ntempted to “help” the users by taking on more function than necessary.
\nAwareness of end-to-end arguments can help to reduce such temptations….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Michael Tsai’s suggestion I listened to the paper End-To-End Arugments in System Design while driving. (Fair warning: Since I was also driving while listening, I didn’t absorb everything as well as I should have.) The thrust of the paper is that you generally want to make your low level components (aka libraries) simpler then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[364,158,169,363],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","tag-error-correction","tag-optimization","tag-software-development","tag-vincent-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}