Go with the flow At the conclusion of Part II we introduced the notion of a (micro)service owning exclusive access to a set of data in order to manage application invariants. Once we start to break things down this way, we need to start thinking about the flow of data between microservices. A better paradigm? … Continue reading Out of the Fire Swamp – Part III, Go with the flow.
Tag: Distributed Systems
Out of the Fire Swamp – Part II, Peering into the mist
Peering into the mist In Part I we examined the data crisis, accepted that anomalies are inevitable, and realized the central importance of the application. But what should we do about it? Here I'm peering into the mist and speculating about a way forward, navigating via the signposts that the database research community has put … Continue reading Out of the Fire Swamp – Part II, Peering into the mist
Out of the Fire Swamp* – Part I, ‘The Data Crisis’
(*) with apologies to Moseley, Marks, and Westley. Something a little different to the regular paper reviews for the next three days. Inspired by yesterday's 'Consistency without Borders,' and somewhat dismayed by what we learned in 'Feral Concurrency Control', I'm going to attempt to pull together a bigger picture, to the extent that I can … Continue reading Out of the Fire Swamp* – Part I, ‘The Data Crisis’
Consistency Without Borders
Consistency Without Borders - Alvaro et al. 2013 We closed out last week by looking at the gap that has opened up between application developer needs and what the database community is providing, leading to the widespread adoption of Feral Concurrency Control. Today's paper, written two years earlier, anticipates this problem and discusses the possible … Continue reading Consistency Without Borders
The Potential Dangers of Causal Consistency and an Explicit Solution
The Potential Dangers of Causal Consistency and an Explicit Solution - Bailis et al. 2012 Yesterday we saw how we could get both better performance and stronger consistency by upgrading from eventual consistency to causal consistency. Are there any downsides? With useful semantics, low latency, partition tolerance, and, recently, a demonstrably efficient architecture, causal consistency … Continue reading The Potential Dangers of Causal Consistency and an Explicit Solution
Bolt-on Causal Consistency
Bolt-on Causal Consistency - Bailis et al. 2013 "It'll probably be OK" seems to reflect the prevailing application developer's attitude to working with eventually consistent stores. Thanks to the work of Bailis et al. on PBS, we can now quantify that 'probably.' And it looks pretty good at first glance, with 99+% probabilities achievable after … Continue reading Bolt-on Causal Consistency
Probabilistically Bounded Staleness for Practical Partial Quorums
Probabilistically Bounded Staleness for Practical Partial Quorums - Bailis et al. 2012, and Quantifying Eventual Consistency with PBS - Bailis et al. 2014 'Probabilistically Bounded Staleness... ' was the original VLDB '12 paper, and then the authors were invited to submit an extended version to the VLDB Journal ('Quantifying Eventual Consistency...') which was published in … Continue reading Probabilistically Bounded Staleness for Practical Partial Quorums
Virtual Time
Virtual Time - Jefferson 1985 Justin LaPre sent me a tweet last week, "I think you would enjoy reading 'Virtual Time' by David Jefferson. Give it a read if you find yourself with some down time. " Thank you Justin, I did read it and I thought it was absolutely wonderful! This paper has time … Continue reading Virtual Time
Asynchronous Distributed Snapshots for Distributed Dataflows
Asynchronous Distributed Snapshots for Distributed Dataflows - Carbone et al. 2015 The team behind Apache Flink and data Artisans are a smart group of folks. Their recent blog post on High-throughput, low-latency, and exactly-once stream processing with Apache Flink is well worth reading and has a good description of the evolution of streaming architectures, the … Continue reading Asynchronous Distributed Snapshots for Distributed Dataflows
Lasp: A language for distributed, coordination-free programming
Lasp: A language for distributed, coordination-free programming - Meiklejohn & Van Roy 2015 * Update: fixed typo in Chris' surname above. * With thanks to Colin Barrett for suggesting today's choice, and to Chris Meiklejohn for providing a link to a paywall-free preprint of the paper. Christopher Meiklejohn recently announced he is leaving Basho to … Continue reading Lasp: A language for distributed, coordination-free programming
the morning paper 