Notes: Distributed Systems in One Lesson by Tim Berglund

Here are some notes on this original video from Tim Berglund. Check it out!

As far as the client goes, a distributed system is a set of computers that act as a single one.

Characteristics

• They operate concurrently
• Fail independently
• They don't share a global clock

Three topics

1) Storage

Start off with a single relational database, you usually get more reads than writes

Read replication

To mitigate the excessive load a DB might be exposed to when the reads become too much, you can use read replication. One master node for writes and several for reads. This is fine until the master node saturates (usually on writes, as reads can scale)

More info on read replication here

Sharding

Sharding. You split the read replication scheme by a key (say First name, so from A-F is one shart, from F-N, then N-Z)

To solve latency issues, you may consider denormalizing your DB (aka removing relations between tables). Please don't.

More info on sharding here

Consistent hashing

Say you have a key/value database. You hash the key and store it according to the shards you have determined. In this example

Each shard indexes a 1/8th of the content, indexed by the hash's first number. If I want to store

{key: "Tim", value: "Americano"}

I'd hash the key first

{hashedKey: "9F72", value: "Americano"}

find the corresponding node (in this case A000 since A000 > 9F72 > 8000) and store it there.

Replication

We'd need to ensure there are no problems with system failure (aka one node going down), you can replicate the data in other nodes (say in the next two nodes as well).
❌ The problem that comes with this is inconsistency, since you are now writing to more than one node. What if you want to write to 3 nodes but one is down? It'll be inconsistent when it's back online.

Consistency or R+W>N

If the number of nodes I write + the number of nodes I read is greater than the number of replicas, you have strong consistency

CAP theorem

• Consistent: When I read something I want it to be the latest version of it.
• Available
• Partition tolerant: If a part of the system falls, the entire system must hold. The theorem basically states that sometimes you must give up one of the three parts in real life applications. Example: If a partition goes down and a read request comes in, you can either:
• a) Give the best answer you can, although it may not be consistent
• b) Sacrifice availability and return an error to ensure that no inconsistent reply is sent.

2) Computation

Distributed computation is basically like moving from a single threaded computation to a multithreaded one, but several times worse.

Imagine you have a bunch of data sitting in a lot of computers and you need to do stuff to it.

Old way: MapReduce

Pushes all your data through two functions

• Map
• Reduce

Example: Say you have the sentence

I want to eat two burgers with fries
and drink two sodas with ice

Map

When you push it throug a map function, it basically makes a "stateless" count of each word (since it won't have any memory yet, so all numbers will effectively be 1)

• {I, 1}
• {want, 1}
• {to, 1}
• {eat, 1}
• {two, 1}
• {burgers, 1}
• {with, 1}
• {and, 1}
• {drink, 1}
• {two, 1}
• {sodas, 1}
• {with, 1}
• {ice, 1}

Shuffle

Since this is a distributed computation, sometimes you may need to move these words across the network, write them next to each other and so on.

Reduce

The reduce function in this case will count properly all usages of a single word

• {I, 1}
• {want, 1}
• {to, 1}
• {eat, 1}
• {two, 2}
• {burgers, 1}
• {with, 2}
• {and, 1}
• {drink, 1}
• {sodas, 1}
• {ice, 1}

We have now managed to split the work of map and the work of reducing among many computers.

More info on map-reduce here

Spark

map-reduce becomes transform-action. Same scatter/gather paradigm.
Spark is also storage agnostic, compared to Hadoop.

Kafka

In kafka everything is a stream, in real time.

3) Messaging

• Systems can talk to each other instead of talking to each other via shared databases.
• Messages are consumed by subscribers
• Created by producers
• Organized into topics
• Processed by brokers
• Usually persistent in the long term, but you can change the retention period to whatever you want.

❌ Problems you may encounter:

• A topic gets too big (huge retention period, messages are huge, read and writes are too fast...)
• Reliability
• Guarantee delivery even if a computer is down

Apache Kafka

⚠ When scaling, you lose system-wide order. You still have partition-wide order.

Producers will create events and randomly assign it to partitions (not really randomly, but for the sake of the argument let's assume so). These partitions will have a consumer on the other side processing whichever event is first on the queue.

The great thing is that, if after the event is created you want to store it, you can! Anyone can subscribe to the topic and from the event generation, you may have a consumer that stores on a MySQL DB the information and another that does some form of real-time processing.

More info on kafka here

Done!

I hope these short notes help you! Don't forget to check the original video and share it!

Have a wonderful day!