Interesting. For two reasons. In the many years that I developed software this was known as the producer/consumer problem [1]. A name that is somewhat (to me) more expressive than back-pressure. But that's just my opinion!
What's different now, as the article points out, is the growth of micro-service architectures. Effectively creating a lot of tiny producer/consumer problems across the solution space.
Sometimes, I'm glad I don't write code anymore, but only sometimes :-)
Yeah, when I was in school it was called "producer/consumer problem" too, back pressure was considered one of the solutions to the problem(what he calls control). I guess someone somewhere confused the two, and it kinda stuck.
Yeah right. This seems like fancy talk for the same scaling problems we've had forever. And it was 100X worse before cloud computing. System-to-system scale problems are generally a lot easier to deal with because you always have the option of resetting expectations with users. Serving web requests has to be real-time, but if a data pipeline has to be overnight due to cost constraints, you can just make the argument to management and do it.
What's different now, as the article points out, is the growth of micro-service architectures. Effectively creating a lot of tiny producer/consumer problems across the solution space.
Sometimes, I'm glad I don't write code anymore, but only sometimes :-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer%E2%80%93consumer_prob...