Right Practice

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote a post, sorry about that! I thought that I would take a brief break from the technical postings and espouse some opinion on something that has been bothering me for a while – ‘Best Practices.’

Best Practices have been around a long time, and started with very good intentions. In fact, one could easily claim that they are still produced with good intentions: To communicate methods that the hardware and software vendors recommend. However, the application of Best Practices has become increasingly abused in the field to the point where they have become more like prescriptions of how systems should be built. This has gone too far, and needs to be challenged.

Best Practices are a misnomer. At best, they should be referred to as Default Practices, because they are simply valid starting points for the implementation of a piece of technology. They do not describe the optimal (or even appropriate) recipe for implementation in every given situation. And yet: Best Practices are now becoming The Law.

It is increasingly difficult to deviate from a Best Practice, even when there are clear and logical reasons why this should happen. Best Practices are being used as an alternative to rational thought.

Consider this: Any given Best Practice is only applicable in a certain set of conditions. For example, it is ‘Best Practice’ not to fill a certain storage vendor’s array with its own SSD drives, it should only be partially populated. This has been prescribed by the storage vendor because the array has not been designed to cope with the high IOPs and bandwidth rates of every device in the array working at full, uncontended, tilt. This Best Practice is not saying that the SSDs will not work, it is simply saying that the full aggregate performance of all those SSDs cannot be sustained by the interconnects and processors in the array. Fair enough. But this Best Practice is being applied in the field as ‘SSDs are bad for the array’. What if your database requires consistent I/O response time of 1ms or less, requires masses of storage, but actually isn’t a very high IOPs or bandwidth consumer?  Isn’t this the ideal situation to fully populate the array with SSD, to achieve the consistent response time and deliver the required storage density? The array will easily cope with the throughput and IOPs rate, thus negating the Best Practice.

There are many such examples as this. It’s time to stop using Best Practice as a substitute for good old-fashioned thinking, and start to implement designs based upon Right Practice: The ‘Right’ Practice for your particular situation. By all means, start with Best Practice documentation, they often have good information within them. But read between the lines and understand the reasoning behind those recommendations, and apply these reasons to your particular application. Are they applicable?

We are big on the Right Practice approach at Scale Abilities, it’s one of the reasons our clients get big value from our involvement. I recommend that  you start to question the logic of Best Practices and start to come up with your own Right Practices.

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Tags: Best Practice, Right Practice, Scale Abilities

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