Brianstorti.com Website Review

In a distributed system we have a group of nodes that need to collaborate and send messages to each other. To achieve that they need system to maintain a list of nodes that are alive, notifying them when a new node joins the group, when someone intentionally leaves and when a node dies (or at least appears to be dead). SWIM, or Scalable Weakly-consistent Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol, Consensus is one of the fundamental problems in distributed systems. We want clients to perceive our system as a single coherent unit, but at the same time we don’t want to have a single point of failure. We need to have several machines collaborating in a way that they can all agree on the state of the world, even though a lot of things can go wrong. Nodes can crash, messages can be delivered out of order or not be delivered at all, and different nodes can have a different idea of what the world looks like. Making a distributed system behave like a coherent unit in face of these failures can be a challenge, and that’s why we sometimes need a consensus algorithm, like Raft, that gives us some guarantees about the properties that we can expect of this system. TCP is the protocol that guarantees we can have a reliable communication channel over an unreliable network. When we send data from a node to another, packets can be lost, they can arrive out of order, the network can be congested or the receiver node can be overloaded. When we are writing an application, though, we usually don’t need to deal with this complexity, we just write some data to a socket and TCP makes sure the packets are delivered correctly to the receiver node. Another important service that TCP provides is what is Replicating a database can make our applications faster and increase our tolerance to failures, but there are a lot of different options available and each one comes with a price tag. It’s hard to make the right choice if we do not understand how the tools we are using work,