Distributed Systems

These distributed systems guides explain what goes wrong when many machines share work. Each post pairs a failure with a practical fix.

Start with eventual consistency in practice. Then race conditions and optimistic locking cover concurrent writes. Later posts handle timeouts, clock skew and partitions.

26 articles

20/09/2021 11 min read

Connection Pooling Explained: Sizing, Timeouts, and Database Overload

Connection Pooling Explained for teams who see timeouts when load spikes hard. Learn pool size, wait limits, and…
09/08/2021 13 min read

The Saga Pattern: Distributed Transactions Without Two-Phase Commit

The saga pattern explained: long-lived business transactions as local steps with compensating transactions, orchestration vs choreography, the transactional…
07/06/2021 14 min read

Distributed Locks: Mutual Exclusion Across Machines

Distributed locks explained: leases and TTLs as mutual exclusion across machines; the Redis distributed lock and its failover…
05/04/2021 12 min read

Fault-Tolerant Systems: Redundancy, Failover, and Failure Detection

Fault tolerant system design: failure models from crash to byzantine, redundancy and the N+1 arithmetic, the failover playbook,…
01/02/2021 12 min read

Distributed Transactions: Two-Phase Commit and Its Alternatives

Distributed transactions explained: two-phase commit step by step, the 2pc coordinator failure that leaves participants in doubt, consensus-backed…
30/11/2020 13 min read

Leader Election in Distributed Systems: Methods and Split-Brain Risk

Leader election in distributed systems explained: leader election algorithms from the bully algorithm to quorum voting, zookeeper leader…
27/09/2020 14 min read

Paxos Explained: The Algorithm Behind Most Consensus Systems

The Paxos algorithm explained: the paxos roles (proposers, acceptors, and learners) how prepare and accept ballots run, the…
26/07/2020 13 min read

Raft Explained: Leader Election, Log Replication, and Safety

The Raft consensus algorithm explained: raft leader election with randomized timeouts, raft log replication through a strong leader,…
24/05/2020 11 min read

Consensus Algorithms Compared: Paxos, Raft, ZAB, and PBFT

Consensus algorithms compared: Paxos and Multi-Paxos, the raft vs paxos difference, ZAB inside ZooKeeper, and byzantine fault tolerant…
22/03/2020 11 min read

Distributed Consensus: Why Agreement Is Hard

Distributed consensus explained: the consensus problem, why agreement is hard under partial failure, the quorum math behind majority…
19/01/2020 9 min read

Consistent Hashing: How Distributed Systems Place Data

Consistent hashing explained: the hash ring, virtual nodes, and the rendezvous hashing alternative; the placement scheme that lets…
17/11/2019 10 min read

What Is a Distributed System? Partial Failure, Clocks, and the Fallacies

What makes a system distributed: several machines cooperating over a network, partial failure as the defining property, no…