https://bravenewgeek.com/tag/i-confluence/Recent content in I-Confluence on Brave New GeekHugoen-usTue, 20 Dec 2016 22:32:34 -0600https://bravenewgeek.com/from-the-ground-up-reasoning-about-distributed-systems-in-the-real-world/Fri, 01 Jan 2016 14:26:50 -0600https://bravenewgeek.com/from-the-ground-up-reasoning-about-distributed-systems-in-the-real-world/<p><em>The rabbit hole is deep. Down and down it goes. Where it ends, nobody knows. But as we traverse it, patterns appear. They give us hope, they quell the fear.</em></p> <p>Distributed systems literature is abundant, but as a practitioner, I often find it difficult to know where to start or how to synthesize this knowledge without a more formal background. This is a non-academic’s attempt to provide a line of thought for rationalizing design decisions. This piece doesn’t necessarily contribute any new ideas but rather tries to provide a holistic framework by studying some influential existing ones. It includes references which provide a good starting point for thinking about distributed systems. Specifically, we look at a few formal results and slightly less formal design principles to provide a basis from which we can argue about system design.</p>