I feel pretty strongly against the idea of immutable infrastructure when you're "infrastructure" (shared systems, running other people's software), but this article isn't about that.
The beef I have with this article is the idea of:
> New computer smell
> Getting a new computer is this moment of cleanliness. The keycaps don’t have oils on them, the screen is perfect, and the hard drive is fresh and unspoiled — for about an hour or so.
In my observation (and in datasets that I have access to), computers systems tend to follow the "infant-mortality" curve. This means that if they run for a little bit, they're likely to run for a long time (and in addition, if you have many of them, they tend to die around the same time). My conjecture is that many computer systems have initialization routines which are not as thoroughly tested as the normal operating state of the system. Due to this, we tend to run into more issues in "immutable" systems than you otherwise would in "mutable" systems.
The beef I have with this article is the idea of:
> New computer smell
> Getting a new computer is this moment of cleanliness. The keycaps don’t have oils on them, the screen is perfect, and the hard drive is fresh and unspoiled — for about an hour or so.
In my observation (and in datasets that I have access to), computers systems tend to follow the "infant-mortality" curve. This means that if they run for a little bit, they're likely to run for a long time (and in addition, if you have many of them, they tend to die around the same time). My conjecture is that many computer systems have initialization routines which are not as thoroughly tested as the normal operating state of the system. Due to this, we tend to run into more issues in "immutable" systems than you otherwise would in "mutable" systems.