Minecraft x distributed systems concepts
Visualize how certain distributed systems concepts work at a high-level without the distraction of implementation details.
- Circuit breaker ✅
- Bulkhead
‼️ - Kubernetes probes
‼️
Legos of distributed systems
Two classes of handling;
- Syncronous, requests and responses
- Asynronous, eventing
The blocks and their problem statements
- 🧱 Discovery
- "How do I know where to send my request?"
- 🧱 Routing/load balancing
- "How do I know who the best candidate for handling my request is?"
- 🪜 Tracing
- "How do I track who in the service web had a say in my request?"
- 🪜📓 Circuit breaking
- "How do I get the space to recover so requests may succeed?"
- 🪜📓 Bulkheads
- "How do I draw a boundary at what I know my limits to be?"
- 🪜📓 Timeouts
- "How do I draw a boundary at where something feels unreasonable?"
- 🪜📓 Retries
- "How do I give a request another chance at success?"
- 📓 Caching
- Reducuction of load on limited, or time expensive, resources
- 📓 Metrics
- "How do I self-report data so the system, or its owners, may make informed decisions"
- 📓 Queueing
- Decoupling of handler and processor
- An implementation of commands
- 📓 Workers
- A method to approach queueing
- Also referred to as distibuted actors
🧱: Foundational infastructure
🪜: Add-on infrastructure
📓: Adoptable pattern
Requests and responses
What components are critical to sending a request?
- Discovery
What components improve the likelihood of a successful request[1]?
- Routing/load balancing
- Circuit breaking
- Bulkheads
- Caching - Both by the consumer, within the application, and by the platform
- Queueing (Within the application not the request itself)
1: Based on best-practices of the distributed systems community
What components drive further success in requests?
- Metrics
- Tracing
Eventing
What components are critical to eventing?
- Queues
- Workers
What components improve the likelihood of successful event processing?
- Retries
- Timeouts
What components drive further success in event processing?
- Metrics
- Tracing