2024-08-10
Allocating disk space (and all resources) is ultimately a political decision
In a multi-person or multi-group environment with shared resources, like a common set of fileservers, you often need to allocate resources like disk space between different uses. There are many different technical ways to do this, and also you can often not explicitly do this by shoving everyone into a big pile. Sometimes, you might be tempted to debate the technical merits of any particular approach, and while the technical merits of different ways potentially matter, in the end resource allocation is a political decision (although what is technically possible or feasible does limit the political options).
(Note that not specifically allocating resources is also a political decision; it is the decision to let resources like disk space be allocated on a first come, first served basis instead of anything else.)
In general, "political" is not a bad word. Politics, in the large, is about mediating social disagreements and, hopefully, making people feel okay about the results. Allocating limited resources is an area where there is no perfect answer and any answer that you choose will have unsatisfactory aspects. Weighing those tradeoffs and choosing a set of them is a (hard) social problem, which must be dealt with through a political decision.
Because resource allocation is a political decision, the specific decisions reached in your organization may well constrain your technical choices and, for example, complicate a storage migration (because you've chosen to allocate disk space in a specific way). Over the course of my career, I've come to understand that this isn't bad as such; it's just that social problems are more important and higher level than technical ones. It's more important to solve the social problems than it is to have an ideal technical world, because ultimately the technology exists to help the people.
One aspect of constraining your technical choices is that you may wind up not doing perfectly sensible and useful technical things because they go against the political decisions and goals around resource allocation. These decisions aren't irrational or wrong, exactly, although they can be hard to explain without explaining the political background.
(This doesn't mean that every design or operations decision that affects resource allocation has to be made at the political level in your organization, and in fact they generally can't be; you have to make some of them, even if it's to not specifically allocate resources and let them be used on a first come, first serve basis (or an 'everyone gets whatever portion they can right now'). But even if you make the decision and do so based on technical factors, it's best to remember that you're making a decision with political effects, and perhaps to think about who will be affected and how.)
PS: This aspect of why things work as they do being hard to explain isn't confined to technology; there are aspects of how the recreational bike club I'm part of operates that people have sometimes asked me about (sometimes in the form of 'why doesn't the club do <sensible seeming thing X>') and I've found hard to explain, especially concisely. Part of the answer is that the club has made a social ('political') decision to operate in a certain way.