Yes. Or at least that is the goal.

What type of "system" is it? A database.

I got fed up having to do maintenance on my database, specifically worrying about having to expand its storage capacity. I'd constantly be woken up in the middle of the night because my entire web application had crashed because it ran out of disk space, because the database greedily pre-allocated excess space to improve performance. I'm not a DevOps guy, so figuring out LVM and MDADM on the fly was a nightmare. And as my app got more popular, things got worse and I just could not keep up.

But then I sat back and thought about it for a minute. I was deploying my app in the cloud, not on my own physical machines. Why was I worrying about expanding storage capacity when the cloud can sell me more of it than I could possibly keep up with? Why was I maintaining finite space when there was an infinite amount available? That doesn't make sense.

The other problem was that despite the fact everything else was working (the web server, the frontend javascript, etc.), if the database server was down then nothing would function properly because data is the life blood of my app. This sucks, if one piece breaks the whole thing is defunct.

So after a while, I decided to change all this. I decided to build a database that would be zero-maintenance, it hit the top of hackernews several times, some big name investors (Tim Draper) got behind it. Check out this demo of it automatically recovering from the complete loss of primaries - https://medium.com/@marknadal/gun-0-2-0-pre-release-auto-rec... .

So how is it zero maintenance? Well some other people in this thread mentioned some important points:

- There are fewer moving parts - there is no database server. Instead it gets embedded into your app server and your frontend (see next point), so the only thing you have to maintain is your app. If your app is flawless or (more likely) can auto-restart just fine, then you'll won't need to do any maintenance.

- It is highly available and redundant because it uses Peer-to-Peer architecture, like BitTorrent. So even if your server crashes, your app can continue to work in offline mode or with WebRTC (not implemented yet) continue to interact with other users. When the server auto-restarts at some point, the offline data will sync back up and resolve any conflicts. If you have more than one server running, then things will continue to work even if one or many of them crash.

- Immutable data allows the system to recover and resolve conflicts without your manual intervention. I'll let others talk about how awesome immutable data is, I'm sure you've heard enough about how many problems it helps with. Especially when it comes to maintaining systems, stuff can't get corrupted, and even when it does, the immutable data allows it to reconstruct itself.

- State machines allow the system in advance to know what is valid and invalid behavior, so it for the most part can avoid going down paths that are "incorrect" which lead to having to do manual maintenance, because it is already instructed in the first place what states to avoid or how to exit those states if it gets into them.

I'm super glad you asked your question, because I feel like a lot of software developers out there are super negative and bitter about it because most systems they have worked with have basically ruined their lives (like what happened to me, having to fix stuff in the middle of the night). But just because a lot of things have been like this, doesn't mean we can't borrow from engineers or mathematicians ways to make zero-maintenance systems. So I really hope you find what you are looking for or build one yourself, if you do please let me know mark@gunDB.io because I'm interested in that sort of stuff. Maybe we could start some group/forum around zero-maintenance systems!