Distributed-Systems

A collection of independent computers that appear to its users as one computer - Andrew Tannenbaum Life was simple when business applications ran on a single server, connected to a single database sitting on a rack in the basement of a company’s office. Everything was local, contained, and relatively easy to reason about. But that model doesn’t hold up anymore. As businesses evolved and data became central to every function — from dashboards to machine learning — the demands on infrastructure grew exponentially. Datasets ballooned in size. It became impractical, even impossible, to store and process everything on a single machine. ...

Eric A. Brewer first introduced the CAP theorem as a keynote talk at the 2000 Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), titled “Towards Robust Distributed Systems” . The original presentation slides from this keynote—created by Brewer himself are available here Brewer’s later reflections and clarifications on the theorem, his 2012 article “CAP Twelve Years Later: How the ‘Rules’ Have Changed” Understanding the CAP theorem has been a game changer for me while reading papers on large scale distributed systems like Amazon Dynamo and Google File Systems. The more I learn to apply it and see how it is being applied makes it feel more natural like the laws of physics. ...