Nov 10, 2022Member-onlyCentralized Coordination II— Distributed Design PatternsIn my last article, we talked about how Centralized Coordination can help us reduce costs associated with performing Linearizable operations in a huge cluster. The idea is to perform operations requiring Linearizability in a small cluster(3–5 nodes). However, just choosing a small cluster doesn’t solve our problem completely. There are…Distributed Systems5 min readDistributed Systems5 min read
Nov 6, 2022Member-onlyCentralized Coordination— Distributed Design PatternsThe beauty of distributed systems is that you can scale horizontally by adding more compute/resources to your system. But as the cluster grows larger, if we have tasks that need Strong Consistency/Linearizability guarantees like Leader Election etc, these guarantees become more expensive to achieve, directly impacting the throughput of your…Distributed Systems3 min readDistributed Systems3 min read
Published in Nerd For Tech·Sep 21, 2022Member-onlyLeases & Fences— Distributed Design PatternsEnsuring consistency of critical data for which we want to have exclusive access, can be achieved through locking. However, in a distributed setup, we can run into scenarios where because of a network partition, process pauses or nodes go down. This leads to the resources being locked indefinitely! Leases To overcome…Distributed Systems4 min readDistributed Systems4 min read
Published in Nerd For Tech·Sep 13, 2022Member-onlyDistributed SnapshotsThrough my last series about Clocks & Version Vectors, the idea was to discuss problems establishing order/causality in a distributed system and ways to achieve the same. One problem in the real world, that needs both concepts is Distributed Snapshots! Problem Statement Point in Time Snapshots is critical for capturing the “consistent”…Distributed Systems8 min readDistributed Systems8 min read
Aug 28, 2022Member-onlyVersion Vectors(III)In my last article, we looked at one of the techniques of identifying concurrent updates/conflicts by leveraging Server(Replica) as an Actor & the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. If we went with the approach to include siblings in our Version Vectors to resolve conflicts, we still don’t have a…Distributed Systems6 min readDistributed Systems6 min read
Aug 22, 2022Member-onlyVersion Vector(II)In my last article, we saw how Distributed Data Stores use Version Vector to identify concurrent updates to data records. We looked at one of the techniques of identifying concurrent updates/conflicts by leveraging ClientId as an Actor & the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. In this article, we’ll look…Distributed Systems3 min readDistributed Systems3 min read
Aug 15, 2022Member-onlyVersion VectorsIn my last article, we talked about Vector Clocks. We learned that Vector Clocks could help establish the ordering of operations, including identifying whether operations happened concurrently or were causally related. A very similar mechanism is used by Version Vector, but it’s used for a slightly different purpose. Version Vector Version Vectors…Distributed Systems5 min readDistributed Systems5 min read
Aug 5, 2022Member-onlyLogical Clocks(II) — Clock SeriesIn my last article, we learned about Lamport Clocks and we saw how Lamport clocks can help us define ordering between our operations. However, given Lamport times( L(A) < L(B) ), we cannot tell whether A happened before B or A and B happened concurrently. It only tells us that…Distributed Systems3 min readDistributed Systems3 min read
Jul 30, 2022Member-onlyLogical Clocks(I) — Clock SeriesIn my last article, we learned that despite physical clock synchronization using NTP servers, we might still see a clock skew of around 10ms. What it means is that if you’re trying to build a high throughput distributed system, where the ordering of operations is critical, you might face issues…Clock4 min readClock4 min read
Jul 7, 2022Member-onlyPhysical Clock Synchronization — Clock SeriesIn my last article, we discussed the various types of physical clocks. We discussed the accuracy offered by those clocks, and how UTC time is derived from TAI & UTI. We also discussed the concept of Leap Second, which is applied to UTC to accommodate for irregularities and the long-term…Distributed Systems6 min readDistributed Systems6 min read
