Distributed Systems Theory for Mere Mortals

GOTO Chicago 2017

This is a light talk about the fundamental topics of distributed systems theory. It introduces a few theoretical system models, and briefly discusses how they reflect to real world problems. It talks about the concept of time, how we perceive and use it to order things in distributed systems. It also touches on the consensus problem by walking through the famous FLP result, failure detectors and a couple of consensus algorithms. Lastly, it mentions the CAP theorem, which gained a lot of attention recently, thanks to the cloud computing paradigm and NoSQL databases. Throughout the journey, it describes how Hazelcast deals with these foundational topics to form its distributed core.