The easy stuff usually gets sliced off and dealt with.
The folks working on these boxes are Not Dumb.
When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not.
These servers and clusters are very different than what most folks are accustomed to dealing with; vastly larger servers, application environments, communications, storage. And unfortunately for upgrades and migrations and incremental work, usually also involving (often fragile and ill-documented and poorly understood) interconnections all over the place. And critical.
> When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not.
But you might find that there is one stock market with a smaller trade volume than the others. Or one of the 50 hospitals in your district is smaller.
If you can peel off a bunch of "early adopters" and make them guinea pigs, you can get some of the benefits of rapid development. You either need the buy in of the early adopters or be able to push them around.
This happens all the time. The UK used to test their laws on the Scots before rolling them out to the rest of the country.
No-one's saying they're dumb. They're saying they're Doing It Wrong. And the things you're talking about - banks and stock - are edge cases of the enterprise world. I would actually argue that most stock markets are actually very well implemented. Banks usually have competent IT too, since IT is a core competency of theirs.
These are edge cases though; most corporate IT is orders of magnitude less sexy than real time trading systems.
The folks working on these boxes are Not Dumb.
When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not.
These servers and clusters are very different than what most folks are accustomed to dealing with; vastly larger servers, application environments, communications, storage. And unfortunately for upgrades and migrations and incremental work, usually also involving (often fragile and ill-documented and poorly understood) interconnections all over the place. And critical.