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In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure
Ruling the Machines that Rule the World?
Our planet's information systems have now reached a level of scale and complexity at which we can no longer simply decide how they will behave. They are so sophisticated and so interconnected that humans can neither steer nor comprehend them with certainty. Can we trust such an infrastructure to society?
For more than twenty years, Mark Burgess has been one of the pioneers of the science and technology behind the operation of this information infrastructure. In this book, he explains how far we have come in our understanding of the systems, and whether we yet have the necessary knowledge to prevent them from spiralling out of control.
In Search of Certainty takes the reader on a fascinating journey, from the beginnings of scientific thought to our present day, illuminating information technology as an integral part of our modern historical and cultural narrative. It lays out key challenges for the future and suggests a daring new way to think about the future governance of the vast cybernetic organism we are in process of creating.
"An instant classic in computer science! 'In Search of Certainty' is a brilliant piece of work by one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. Complex systems, like modern IT services, need to be understood from a perspective very different from traditional IT practice. The answers are rooted in science and Mark Burgess exposes this science like nobody else."
-- Glenn O'Donnell, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
"An incredible journey by one of the [IT] industry's most important thinkers over the past 20 years. Like everything else he's done, this is unique and astonishing in its implications."
--Carolyn Rowland, NIST
"Mark brings together the digital microcosm and macrocosm, the mundane and the profound, the human and the technological, in a way that is important, wonderful, and truly mind-stretching."
-- Jeff Sussna, Ingineering.IT
"Mark Burgess practically invented modern IT infrastructure management software. Now he has produced a revolutionary work, part personal journey, part theoretical review, as he advances the state of infrastructure science -- and our comprehension -- again. IN SEARCH OF CERTAINTY is a must-read book from a true visionary."
--Christopher Little, BMC Software
"There are thought leaders, and then there are thought leaders. Mark Burgess is a scientist who can talk to the real world, and has been challenging it for 20 years, with the message of science."
-- Reynold Jabbour, J.P. Morgan-Chase
"Holy cow!"
-- Gene Kim, Author of Phoenix Project
"To err is human, to explain is Mark Burgess."
-- Patrick Debois
"I only got through the Introduction and Chapter 1. I was so encouraged by just those that I started applying it to organization at Joyent and forgot to come back to the book."
-- Ben Rockwood, Joyent
"A philosophy of informatics obviously contrasting with but also complementing Floridi's philosophy of information."
-- Jan Bergstra, Professor University of Amsterdam
"What I liked most about the book was the vast number of topics it drew on, there are examples from a very broad array of domains. This made it very fun. ... It really is a tour de force of most interesting things that have happened for the past 500 years..."
-- Sigurd Teigen, CFEngine
"The book is in parts a very personal description of the world we live in, and how it evolved... the book is about a journey, a personal one. I did like that part very much.
Our planet's information systems have now reached a level of scale and complexity at which we can no longer simply decide how they will behave. They are so sophisticated and so interconnected that humans can neither steer nor comprehend them with certainty. Can we trust such an infrastructure to society?
For more than twenty years, Mark Burgess has been one of the pioneers of the science and technology behind the operation of this information infrastructure. In this book, he explains how far we have come in our understanding of the systems, and whether we yet have the necessary knowledge to prevent them from spiralling out of control.
In Search of Certainty takes the reader on a fascinating journey, from the beginnings of scientific thought to our present day, illuminating information technology as an integral part of our modern historical and cultural narrative. It lays out key challenges for the future and suggests a daring new way to think about the future governance of the vast cybernetic organism we are in process of creating.
"An instant classic in computer science! 'In Search of Certainty' is a brilliant piece of work by one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. Complex systems, like modern IT services, need to be understood from a perspective very different from traditional IT practice. The answers are rooted in science and Mark Burgess exposes this science like nobody else."
-- Glenn O'Donnell, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
"An incredible journey by one of the [IT] industry's most important thinkers over the past 20 years. Like everything else he's done, this is unique and astonishing in its implications."
--Carolyn Rowland, NIST
"Mark brings together the digital microcosm and macrocosm, the mundane and the profound, the human and the technological, in a way that is important, wonderful, and truly mind-stretching."
-- Jeff Sussna, Ingineering.IT
"Mark Burgess practically invented modern IT infrastructure management software. Now he has produced a revolutionary work, part personal journey, part theoretical review, as he advances the state of infrastructure science -- and our comprehension -- again. IN SEARCH OF CERTAINTY is a must-read book from a true visionary."
--Christopher Little, BMC Software
"There are thought leaders, and then there are thought leaders. Mark Burgess is a scientist who can talk to the real world, and has been challenging it for 20 years, with the message of science."
-- Reynold Jabbour, J.P. Morgan-Chase
"Holy cow!"
-- Gene Kim, Author of Phoenix Project
"To err is human, to explain is Mark Burgess."
-- Patrick Debois
"I only got through the Introduction and Chapter 1. I was so encouraged by just those that I started applying it to organization at Joyent and forgot to come back to the book."
-- Ben Rockwood, Joyent
"A philosophy of informatics obviously contrasting with but also complementing Floridi's philosophy of information."
-- Jan Bergstra, Professor University of Amsterdam
"What I liked most about the book was the vast number of topics it drew on, there are examples from a very broad array of domains. This made it very fun. ... It really is a tour de force of most interesting things that have happened for the past 500 years..."
-- Sigurd Teigen, CFEngine
"The book is in parts a very personal description of the world we live in, and how it evolved... the book is about a journey, a personal one. I did like that part very much.
446 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 30, 2013
36 people are currently reading
353 people want to read
About the author
Mark Burgess
29 books32 followersMark Burgess is a writer with many interests. His books span from fiction to hard science, and he actively writes philosphically in his blog about all aspects of modern information culture. He is an active public speaker on the international conference circuit, and is engaged in promoting science to a wide audience.
He is the Founder and original author of CFEngine. He was senior lecturer and then appointed full professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College from 1994-2011. He was the first professor with this title, and is largely responsible for defining the field. Mark Burgess obtained a PhD in Theoretical Physics at Newcastle University, for which he received the Runcorn Prize.
He is the Founder and original author of CFEngine. He was senior lecturer and then appointed full professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College from 1994-2011. He was the first professor with this title, and is largely responsible for defining the field. Mark Burgess obtained a PhD in Theoretical Physics at Newcastle University, for which he received the Runcorn Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 1, 2020
I got around half of the way through, then gave up. Found it packed with intellectual references, but a challenging read (trying to get to the point) for sure.
I think there's a big space of books of "smart people trying to describe things using all the tools they know of, but definitely having a difficult time to do so", with a bunch of common topics (in this case, context seemed really important).
I think there's a big space of books of "smart people trying to describe things using all the tools they know of, but definitely having a difficult time to do so", with a bunch of common topics (in this case, context seemed really important).
June 1, 2015
A thought-provoking but often frustrating read.
Burgess lays out a conceptual framework for buildilng reliable IT infrastructure using promise theory: a bottom-up approach to constructing systems that can heal themselves in a manner akin to biological organizations.
The author offers a lot to think about, the presentation of the book hurts his thesis. The author attempts to weave a narrative that includes many differnt concepts: from Shannon's information theory, Feynman diagrams, cellular automata, W. Edward Deming, and much more. However, he tells the story at too high a level of abstraction for a reader new to these concepts. In particular, he relies too much on analogies and not enough on specific IT-based examples. Burgess wrote the venerable CFEngine configuration management system that employs these concepts, and perhaps CFEngine users would have an easier time understanding how these concepts apply on the ground, but as someone new to these concepts, I often struggled to see how they would apply in practice. The high level nature of the writing also made the book into a slog. I had to force myself to push through to to get to the end of it.
Burgess lays out a conceptual framework for buildilng reliable IT infrastructure using promise theory: a bottom-up approach to constructing systems that can heal themselves in a manner akin to biological organizations.
The author offers a lot to think about, the presentation of the book hurts his thesis. The author attempts to weave a narrative that includes many differnt concepts: from Shannon's information theory, Feynman diagrams, cellular automata, W. Edward Deming, and much more. However, he tells the story at too high a level of abstraction for a reader new to these concepts. In particular, he relies too much on analogies and not enough on specific IT-based examples. Burgess wrote the venerable CFEngine configuration management system that employs these concepts, and perhaps CFEngine users would have an easier time understanding how these concepts apply on the ground, but as someone new to these concepts, I often struggled to see how they would apply in practice. The high level nature of the writing also made the book into a slog. I had to force myself to push through to to get to the end of it.
August 29, 2017
Fascinating book with a lot of important and interesting points. Not great on the readability front. If you are working on/with a complex distributed system, this has some good ideas that are worth wrestling with. Recommended.
February 7, 2018
This is an excellent, if somewhat longwinded, read on scientifically approaching the topic of technology infrastructure and interaction as of today.
It discusses an impressive spectrum of topics across physics, information technology, computer science, formal logic, showing a deep insight of the current shortcomings and challenges we're facing.
He doesn't get too deeply technical throughout the book, it's mostly a storytelling approach to discover a path that the author had followed throughout his research history. During this journey he points out discoveries and pitfalls on current research, and outlines his own approach to modelling complex dynamical and semantic systems with a theoretical framework of his own, i.e. Theory of Promises.
At times I felt overwhelmed by the number of references to scientific notions and research results.
I also often felt puzzled while trying to follow the author's reasoning when some of the concepts were introduced and discussed with what I felt was a lack of explanatory examples.
I may be possibly missing the necessary background knowledge to completely understand the connections.
It maybe that a single read is not enough to actually absorb all the content presented in the book.
I would suggest other books from the author if you want to get detailed explanation of the theory exposed, in particular Thinking in Promises.
Overall I heartily recommend this book to everyone interested in modern software systems and their growing impact on our lives.
I will certainly follow Mark Burgess work in the future.
It discusses an impressive spectrum of topics across physics, information technology, computer science, formal logic, showing a deep insight of the current shortcomings and challenges we're facing.
He doesn't get too deeply technical throughout the book, it's mostly a storytelling approach to discover a path that the author had followed throughout his research history. During this journey he points out discoveries and pitfalls on current research, and outlines his own approach to modelling complex dynamical and semantic systems with a theoretical framework of his own, i.e. Theory of Promises.
At times I felt overwhelmed by the number of references to scientific notions and research results.
I also often felt puzzled while trying to follow the author's reasoning when some of the concepts were introduced and discussed with what I felt was a lack of explanatory examples.
I may be possibly missing the necessary background knowledge to completely understand the connections.
It maybe that a single read is not enough to actually absorb all the content presented in the book.
I would suggest other books from the author if you want to get detailed explanation of the theory exposed, in particular Thinking in Promises.
Overall I heartily recommend this book to everyone interested in modern software systems and their growing impact on our lives.
I will certainly follow Mark Burgess work in the future.
June 8, 2014
This is an insightful book that will make you rethink how we manage infrastructure and changes.
Burgess covers a lot of background before proposing his approach. While many of the topics (history of science, quantum physics, information theory, etc) will be familiar to those reading this, it was a nice summary of current thinking. He then bring all these threads together well in the last third of the book.
I would summarize Burgess' approach as DevOps + Antifragile. The book's theme of creating stability at higher layers by embracing instability at lower levels screamed "ANTIFRAGILE" to me at every turn. Oddly enough, though, Taleb is not cited and the author seems unaware of the linkage.
One warning for anyone reading this book: the typography is terrible! To Burgess' credit, his Web page cites that he struggles with typographical errors. Even so, if anyone edited this book, it does not show. I didn't mind the grammar and spelling issues (as a somewhat reformed grammar nazi), yet the number of repeated words, left out words, and sentences that just made no sense made me want to throw this book against the wall about a dozen times.
Even so, this book is worth working through. I am hopeful that this will drive further research and conversation in this important area.
Burgess covers a lot of background before proposing his approach. While many of the topics (history of science, quantum physics, information theory, etc) will be familiar to those reading this, it was a nice summary of current thinking. He then bring all these threads together well in the last third of the book.
I would summarize Burgess' approach as DevOps + Antifragile. The book's theme of creating stability at higher layers by embracing instability at lower levels screamed "ANTIFRAGILE" to me at every turn. Oddly enough, though, Taleb is not cited and the author seems unaware of the linkage.
One warning for anyone reading this book: the typography is terrible! To Burgess' credit, his Web page cites that he struggles with typographical errors. Even so, if anyone edited this book, it does not show. I didn't mind the grammar and spelling issues (as a somewhat reformed grammar nazi), yet the number of repeated words, left out words, and sentences that just made no sense made me want to throw this book against the wall about a dozen times.
Even so, this book is worth working through. I am hopeful that this will drive further research and conversation in this important area.
May 10, 2015
Thought provoking (my copy is now full of post-it flags from all the interesting passages I wanted to come back to), but ultimately Mark Burgess was trying to do too much in this book. He spent a ton of time trying to hang together physics metaphors for large scale computing systems as a way to make the case for Promise Theory, the modeling approach he has been developing. As a former physics guy myself, I appreciate where he's coming from and I fall back on some of the same tools (phase transitions, equilibrium states) when I think about infrastructure, but I'm not convinced that's useful beyond just being a personal habit of mind. There were lots of citations to academic papers in here - perhaps some of those make explicit how promise theory modeling is actually isomorphic to physical structures.
I was most excited to learn more about promise theory, in which systems are modeled using voluntary commitments from individual actors (human or machine) to act in specific ways conditional on promises being kept by other agents, but I felt starved for practical examples of what a promise-based model looks like in practice. I got the sense that there are conceptual similarities with agile software development, pull-based workflows, DevOps, and actor-based concurrency, but it never really gelled into a unified framework.
I was most excited to learn more about promise theory, in which systems are modeled using voluntary commitments from individual actors (human or machine) to act in specific ways conditional on promises being kept by other agents, but I felt starved for practical examples of what a promise-based model looks like in practice. I got the sense that there are conceptual similarities with agile software development, pull-based workflows, DevOps, and actor-based concurrency, but it never really gelled into a unified framework.
June 6, 2014
This is heavy but enjoyable reading. It is very science focused and the first section of the book can be hard work - but getting through it provides essential concepts useful in the later sections. Promise Theory as a means to build better infrastructure gets a good run out - although once again at times this is quite hard work for someone lacking the science background. Understanding the concepts behind the CFEngine tool was really useful and will encourage me to read some other papers produced by the Author on Computer Immunology and Promise Theory. If you are interested in building better infrastructure...you need to read this book!
June 12, 2014
The least technical book of Mark, and therefore more easy to read. Still a lot of connections to other fields than IT like physics, building to a statement that System administration is still at the beginning of a revolution.
December 10, 2014
I found the first two parts to be more interesting than the third. Overall is was a decent book, but it lag in the end. There was also a severe editing problem. I found so many mistakes in grammar, it became quite tedious at times. Just who I wonder is responsible for.this.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews