In Search of Certainty

Chapter 12. Molecular and Material Infrastructure: Elastic, plastic and brittle design

The history of attempts to prevent cracks from spreading or evade their consequences is almost the history of engineering.

J.E. Gordon

In the first part of this book, I explained how our apparently predictable and continuous world is really discrete and non-deterministic at its heart, and how one of the major achievements of the 20th century was to come to terms with this insight. Along the way, we’ve seen how ideas that are dynamically similar to that insight appear in descriptions of information technology too, providing clues about how to develop a more sophisticated view of our electronic information infrastructure.

One place where the discrete nature of information infrastructure is especially apparent is in the giant datacentres that feed our Internet services. In this chapter, I want to describe how the concept of promises can help us to understand and recover a notion of scaled continuity in those places that keep services running, unifying performance and intent without sacrificing the benefits of the autonomous point of view. This is how to equip systems with the ability to evolve to the next level of pervasive infrastructure, in which datacentres break apart and grow to cover the entire surface of the planet, embedded ever more locally into smart environments. To get there, we need to picture semantic and dynamic aspects of human-computer systems as a single resilient material.

In true ...