The author begins by discussing the purpose of the Builders’ Library, which is to gather the expertise of experienced builders at Amazon and share their insights on building systems at scale. The author then introduces an anti-fragility pattern developed by Colm MacCárthaigh called “Reliability, constant work, and a good cup of coffee”. The pattern is compared to the concept of coffee urns, which have a constant amount of work regardless of the number of people wanting coffee. The author explains that constant work patterns are used in highly reliable systems to handle increases in load and respond to failures. Two examples of constant work patterns in Amazon are discussed: Route 53 health checks and Amazon S3 as a configuration loop. These examples demonstrate the reliability and self-healing nature of constant work patterns.
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/11/standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants-colm-on-constant-work.html