What You Want Is What You Don’t: Understanding Trade-Offs in Distributed Messaging

Sun, 23 Aug 2015 17:59:39 -0500

If there’s one unifying theme of this blog, it’s that distributed systems are riddled with trade-offs. Specifically, with distributed messaging, you cannot have exactly-once delivery. However, messaging trade-offs don’t stop at delivery semantics. I want to talk about what I mean by this and explain why many developers often have the wrong mindset when it comes to building distributed applications.

The natural tendency is to build distributed systems as if they aren’t distributed at all—assuming data consistency, reliable messaging, and predictability. It’s much easier to reason about, but it’s also blatantly misleading.

Tcp on Brave New Geek

What You Want Is What You Don’t: Understanding Trade-Offs in Distributed Messaging