In this blog post, we will explore distributed systems through the lens of two fundamental dimensions: synchronous versus asynchronous and sequential versus concurrent. Different authors think differently about terminology. I do not want to claim that my thoughts are correct and others’ are not correct. …

In arguably the most fundamental work in computer science, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman, the term abstraction appears on page one, chapter one, headline one. Abelson and Sussman identify Abstractions as one of the 3 fundamental building blocks of computer programs: Primitive expressions, means of…

A formal model of Sagas At temporal.io, we have a recurring event dubbed Temporal University where the team explores the ins and outs of Temporal’s architecture. I have done a few presentations but one stands out as my personal favorite: Small-Step Operational Semantics of Temporal’s Durable Executions. Small-step operational semantics (SOS) are often used for…

H. Garcia-Molina and K. Salem. 1987. Sagas. In Proceedings of the 1987 ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data (SIGMOD ‘87). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 249–259. Keywords: Long Running Processes, Sagas, Transactions, Compensation, Failure Mitigation, Failure Tolerance, Failure Transparency Although the original paper on Sagas…

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…