Distributed Systems

Core distributed systems topics, for example consistency, availability and so on.

Experience with Rules-Based Programming for Distributed Concurrent Fault-Tolerant Code

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments
Experience with Rules-Based Programming for Distributed, Concurrent, Fault-Tolerant Code - Stutsman et al. 2015 As we saw in yesterday's paper, the authors of RAMCloud settled on a very effective design pattern for writing distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant (DCFT) modules within their system. They call this pattern 'rules-based programming' - a collection of (condition,action) pairs that can ... Continue Reading

The RAMCloud Storage System

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments
The RAMCloud Storage System - Ousterhout et al. 2015 This paper is a comprehensive overview of RAMCloud, published in the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems in August 2015. It's a long read (55 pages), but there's a ton of great material here. The RAMCloud project started in 2009, so this is therefore an overview of ... Continue Reading

Consensus on Transaction Commit

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
Consensus on Transaction Commit - Gray & Lamport 2004/5 Last year on The Morning Paper we spent a considerable amount of time looking at consensus protocols. Over the last couple of days we've been looking at the two-phase commit protocol. But isn't two-phase commit just a special purpose version of the consensus problem, where we ... Continue Reading

Building Consistent Transactions with Inconsistent Replication

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Building Consistent Transactions with Inconsistent Replication - Zhang et al. 2015 Is there life beyond 'beyond distributed transactions?' In this paper, Zhang et al. introduce a layered approach to supporting distribution transactions, showing that a Transactional Application Protocol can be built on top of an Inconsistent Replication protocol (TAPIR). This direction is similar in spirit ... Continue Reading