Keywords Failure, Failure Tolerance, Failure Transparence, Failure Detection, Failure Mitigation, Application vs platform-level, Failure Presentation, Transient, Intermittent, Permanent, Recovery, Forward Recovery, Backward Recovery, Repair, Manual Repair, Auto Repair This blog post presents a blueprint for a principled failure handling strategy that guarantees correctness and completeness while maximizing the chance of…

Felix C. Gärtner. 1999. Fundamentals of fault-tolerant distributed computing in asynchronous environments. ACM Comput. Surv. 31, 1 (March 1999), 1–26. Keywords: Failure, Failure Detection, Failure Mitigation, Failure Tolerance, Failure Transparence This paper explores the very foundations of failure, failure tolerance, and failure transparence. In Fundamentals of fault-tolerant distributed computing in…

J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark. 1984. End-to-end arguments in system design. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2, 4 (Nov. 1984), 277–288. Key Words Function, Completeness, Correctness, Application Layer, Platform Layer, Failure, Failure Detection, Failure Mitigation. The End-to-End Argument is a great, thought provoking paper that…

Kubernetes is a Container Orchestration Engine designed to host containerized applications on a set of nodes, commonly referred to as a cluster. Using a systems modeling approach, this series aims to advance the understanding of Kubernetes and its underlying concepts. Recommended Read Kubernetes Networking by Maegan Jong and Dominik Tornow Overview The Kubernetes…

by Maegan Jong and Dominik Tornow Kubernetes is a Container Orchestration Engine designed to host containerized applications on a set of nodes, commonly referred to as a cluster. Using a systems modeling approach, this series aims to advance the understanding of Kubernetes and its underlying concepts. For this blog post…

by Dominik Tornow and Maegan Jong Infrastructure as a Service, Infrastructure as Code, or recently Infrastructure as Data — certainly infrastructure comes in many forms, shapes, and sizes. Yet, even though these terms sound deceptively similar and deceptively simple, they denote fundamentally different and intricate concepts. After Infrastructure as a…

Ever since the term “Microservice” made its debut in 2005, its usage has grown in popularity. However, even in 2020, a concise and accurate definition is not readily available. This article provides a definition for technical and non-technical stakeholders. This blog post provides concise and accurate definitions of the concepts…

Ever since the term “serverless” made its debut in 2012, its usage has grown in popularity. However, a concise and accurate definition is not readily available. This article provides a definition for technical and non-technical stakeholders. This blog post provides a concise and accurate definition of the concept serverless. Model of computation The…

By Andrew Chen and Dominik Tornow