SE-Radio Episode 241: Kyle Kingsbury on Consensus in Distributed Systems

Kyle Kingsbury, known as Aphyr on Twitter and for his blog by the same name, talks to Stefan Tilkov about consensus in distributed systems and about his experience in testing systems to see how they behave in case of failures. In addition to discussing some of the theoretical foundations, such as the CAP theorem, isolation levels, and consensus protocols, Kyle talks about some specific databases, including MongoDB, Riak, and Redis, and discusses how they maintain and achieve — or fail to achieve — a consistent state. Finally, there’s some advice for practitioners on how to pick a solution and understand its properties.

Venue: Internet

Related Links

• Kyle’s website https://aphyr.com/

Call me maybe – the Jepsen blog post series https://aphyr.com/tags/Jepsen

• ANSI SQL Isolation Levels http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B12037_01/server.101/b10743/consist.htm#sthref1919
• CAP Theorem http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=564601
• CRDTs: CRDTs: Consistency without concurrency control http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Marc.Shapiro/papers/RR-6956.pdf?
• Dynamo http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html
• Postgres http://www.postgresql.org/
• Redis http://redis.io/
• Redis’ Sentinel protocol http://redis.io/topics/sentinel
• MongoDB https://www.mongodb.org/
• Riak http://basho.com/products/riak-kv/
• zookeeper http://zookeeper.apache.org/
• NuoDB http://www.nuodb.com/
• Kafka https://kafka.apache.org/
• Cassandra https://cassandra.apache.org/
• Rabbit MQ https://www.rabbitmq.com/
• consul https://www.consul.io/
• etcd https://github.com/coreos/etcd
• Elasticsearch https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch
• Raft https://raft.github.io/
• Clojure http://clojure.org/
• TLA+ http://www.tlaplus.net/
• Spin http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html
• Quickcheck http://www.quviq.com/products/erlang-quickcheck/
• Foundation DB https://foundationdb.com/
• Paxos http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf
• ZAB (Zookeeper Atomic Broadcast) http://www.tcs.hut.fi/Studies/T-79.5001/reports/2012-deSouzaMedeiros.pdf
• Knossos https://github.com/aphyr/knossos
• Christopher Meiklejohn’s website http://christophermeiklejohn.com/
• Strong Consistency Models https://aphyr.com/posts/313-strong-consistency-models
• Peter Bailis’s website http://www.bailis.org/

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