category
Messaging
- #20 7 min
Distributed Messaging with ZeroMQ
“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable.” -Leslie Lamport With the increased prevalence and accessibility of cloud computing, distributed systems architecture has largely supplanted more monolithic constructs. The implication of using a service-oriented architecture, of course, is that you now have to deal with a myriad of difficulties that previously never existed, such as fault tolerance, availability, and horizontal scaling. Another interesting layer of complexity is providing consistency across nodes, which itself is a problem surrounded with endless research. Algorithms like Paxos and Raft attempt to provide solutions for managing replicated data, while other solutions offer eventual consistency.
- #17 4 min
Real-Time Client Notifications Using Redis and Socket.IO
Backbone.js is great for building structured client-side applications. Its declarative event-handling makes it easy to listen for actions in the UI and keep your data model in sync, but what about changes that occur to your data model on the server? Coordinating user interfaces for data consistency isn’t a trivial problem. Take a simple example: users A and B are viewing the same data at the same time, while user A makes a change to that data. How do we propagate those changes to user B? Now, how do we do it at scale, say, several thousand concurrent users? What about external consumers of that data?