Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar

What sets distributed systems engineering apart is the probability of failure and, worse, the probability of partial failure. If a well-formed mutex unlock fails with an error, we can assume the process is unstable and crash it. But the failure of a distributed mutex’s unlock must be built into the lock protocol.

Backpressure is the signaling of failure from a serving system to the requesting system and how the requesting system handles those failures to prevent overloading itself and the serving system. Designing for backpressure means bounding resource use during times of overload and times of system failure. This is one of the basic building blocks of cr... See more

Percentiles (50th, 99th, 99.9th, 99.99th) are more accurate and informative than averages in the vast majority of distributed systems. Using a mean assumes that the metric under evaluation follows a bell curve but, in practice, this describes very few metrics an engineer cares about. “Average latency” is a commonly reported metric, but I’ve never o... See more