Distributed Systems
9 topics in distributed systems.
Heartbeats in Distributed Systems
Failure detection is the foundation of fault tolerance. Without heartbeats, you cannot know when a server has crashed, and failover cannot begin.
Service Discovery
In microservices architectures with dynamic scaling (containers, Kubernetes), services come and go constantly.
Consensus Algorithms
Without consensus, distributed systems cannot reliably replicate data, elect leaders, or coordinate actions.
Distributed Locking
Without distributed locks, concurrent processes can cause data corruption, double-spending, overselling inventory, or duplicate processing.
Gossip Protocol
Gossip protocols enable decentralized failure detection, membership management, and data dissemination without a central coordinator.
Circuit Breaker Pattern
Without circuit breakers, a failing downstream service can cascade failures throughout your system.
Disaster Recovery
Disasters happen: AWS us-east-1 has had multi-hour outages, entire data centers have lost power, and ransomware attacks have encrypted production.
Distributed Tracing
In a microservices system, a single user request may pass through 10+ services. When something is slow or fails, you need to see the entire chain to find.
Leader Election
How distributed systems elect a single leader to coordinate work, covering Raft, Bully, and Ring algorithms, along with real-world implementations in.