Tokyo Stock Exchange Blackout: One Piece of Hardware Took Down a Market
I've seen the guts of a few major financial organizations, and there are some common themes regarding their infrastructures.<p>The one that really sticks out to me as an engineer is the fact that the whole system in most cases seems to be tied together by a fragile arrangement of 100+ different vendors' systems & middleware that were each tailored to fit specific audit items that cropped up over the years.<p>Individually, all of these components have highly-available assurances up and down their contracts, but combine all these durable components together haphazardly and you get emergent properties that no one person or vendor can account for comprehensively.<p>When the article says a full reset entails killing the power and restarting, this is my actual experience. These complex leviathans have to be brought up in a special snowflake sequence or your infra state machine gets fucked up and you have to start all over. When dependency chains are 10+ systems long and part of a complex web of other dependency chains it starts to get hopeless pretty quickly.