Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
somethingsimilar.com
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#2Really great article...an instant classic.
Shameless plug It's validating that we mentioned over half of these points in an interview with startup founder Eric Lindvall on his Papertrailapp.com log management app: https://peepcode.com/products/up-lindvall
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#3Does distributed always mean a complex multi-tier web application?
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#4Does distributed always mean a complex multi-tier web application?
No. That's only one example, depending on how the website is setup, but they're not limited to that. A distributed system is one that requires coordination among multiple machines to execute a task or set of tasks. A few examples:
- A website using a load balancer to offset service to multiple machines
- A hadoop cluster running a series of mapreduce tasks
- A botnet setup to DDOS some target
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#5Great article.
I've just recently started exploring distributed systems (specifically with Riak Core/Erlang) and I hit upon a solution to a problem I've been working on (I think) while reading.
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#6there are only 2 problems in computer science.
0. naming things
1. cache invalidation
2. off-by-one errors
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#7There's a growing area where I see a lot of people starting to get involved with distributed system who didn't have to deal with it before: rich in-browser apps with their own permanent storage.
Once you have a Javascript application with state speaking over one or more APIs to your backend services, you're in the domain of distributed system design. Especially if you use the application cache and support offline operation. I frequently see people who are used to more traditional web applications underestimate the system design challenges this causes.
(Those challenges are totally worth solving, because the model is very powerful.)
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#8[deleted]
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#9that is an awesome article. And if you're paying attention a great way to interview potential engineers for your org who will be asked to build distributed systems. At Google one of the engineers was asked if the system they were building was 'mostly reliable' and his answer was great, he said "No, I assume that every computer this runs on is trying to bring down the service, and the service tries to dodge in such a way that it stays up anyway."
Re: Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
#10Great article; concise explanation of most of the points I would have expected to be there. Especially some of the more subtle things like backpressure everywhere, measure with percentiles, and the importance of being partially available.