Posts

Last time we introduced the Gossip Glomers challenge from Fly.io and discussed our approach to Challenge #2: Unique ID Generation. This time, we’ll talk about the first three parts of Challenge #3: Broadcast. Parts D and E are saved for a separate post as they’re a bit more involved. The overall theme of Challenge 3 is to build a broacast system to propagate messages to all nodes1. We iteratively build up our system, from a single-node cluster that simply stores and returns received messages, to a multi-node cluster that shares received messages, to a fault-tolerant multi-node cluster that can operate even during network partitions by Part C (D and E are about efficiency)....

One of the challenges for practicing implementing distributed systems is that it is not easy to simulate the various situations a distributed system might find itself in. Moreover, I previously could not even come up with an easy way to deploy a toy setup; the only thing I could think of is to use minikube and build a Kubernetes-based environment, but frankly at that point it is too much investment for me1....

In the past two years, we’ve moved twice. The first time we moved, we packed a bag of clothes intended for recycling or donation. Then, we got lazy and simply brought that bag with us while moving. The second time we moved, we brought the bag, still packed, without a second thought. 7 months after settling into our new home, we decided enough was enough. We were going to get rid of all of the clothing and shoes we weren’t wearing anymore!...

I’ll soon be attending Markus Kuppe’s workshop on TLA+ and one of the pre-read materials is Dijkstra’s EWD998 - Shmuel Safra’s version of termination detection. I haven’t read a serious, academic paper since college like 3 years ago1, so it was quite an adventure getting back into the swing of things. As I was reading, I spent a lot of time going back and forth to make things make sense, because the hallmark of a real paper is that you can’t just consume it in one go if you actually want to understand the material....

Originally published on Medium. When you use Azure CDN to deliver content, you may need to purge your endpoint so that changes you make are sent to your users, as files are cached in the Azure CDN until their time-to-live (TTL) expires. If you don’t set a TTL for your files, Azure automatically sets a TTL of 7 days. Even if you set a lower TTL, your updates may not coincide with the cache expiration....