/Distributed System

Fallacies Of Distributed Systems

tl;dr: "Fallacies of distributed systems are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make."

featured in #371


The Distributed Computing Manifesto

- Werner Vogels tl;dr: "Today, I am publishing the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the architecture of Amazon’s e-commerce platform. It highlights the challenges we were facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where we were headed."

featured in #370


Resiliency In Distributed Systems

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "Understanding the ins and outs of distributed systems is important for both backend engineers and for anyone working with large-scale systems. Large-scale systems can mean systems with high load and high queries per second (QPS), storing a large amount of data, or ones built with low latency and high reliability. These systems are pretty common across both Big Tech and high-growth startups."

featured in #355


Fallacies Of Distributed Systems

- Mahdi Yusuf tl;dr: (1) The network is reliable, (2) Latency is zero, (3) Bandwidth is infinite, (4) The network is secure, (5) Topology doesn't change, (6) There is one administrator, (7) Transport cost is zero, (8) The network is homogeneous. 

featured in #323


Distributed Systems Shibboleths

- Joseph Lynch tl;dr: "Shibboleths are historically a word that indicate membership in a particular group or culture.... I have only studied and worked in the field for around a decade, but in that time I believe I have learned to recognize some key “distsys shibboleths” that help me recognize when I can trust what a vendor or other engineer is telling me."

featured in #314


Building Robust Distributed Systems

- Kislay Verma tl;dr: "I have written before on this blog about what distributed systems are and how they can give us tremendous scalability at the cost of having to deal with a more complicated system design. Let’s discuss how we can make a distributed system resilient to random failures which get more common as the system gets larger."

featured in #299


The Internet Was Designed With A Narrow Waist

- Andy Chu tl;dr: A narrow waist is concept, interface, or protocol that solves an interoperability problem. Picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle. Andy illustrates how IP is an example, and how that impacts internet architecture. 

featured in #299


Caches, Modes, And Unstable Systems

- Marc Brooker tl;dr: "Good caches have feedback loops. Like back pressure, and limited concurrency. Bad caches are typically open-loop. This starts to give us a hint about how we may use caches safely, and points to some of the safe patterns for distributed systems caching."

featured in #250


Edgar: Solving Mysteries Faster With Observability

- Elizabeth Carretto tl;dr: "Edgar helps Netflix teams troubleshoot distributed systems efficiently with the help of a summarized presentation of request tracing, logs, analysis, and metadata." A run through of how it works.

featured in #204


Patterns Of Distributed Systems

- Unmesh Joshi tl;dr: "What follows is a first set of patterns observed in mainstream open source distributed systems. I hope that these set of patterns will be useful to all developers."

featured in #199