Mathias Meyer
Mathias Meyer

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Here’s a list of things I’ve been reading lately or that I’m about to read, and that I found to be worth sharing. If you’re looking for something to read over the holidays, I’m happy to give you some suggestions. Books, papers, articles, and videos, something for everyone.

Scalability Rules

A list of 50 rules related to scalability, in an easy to read recipe style. They leave some stuff to the imagination, and I don’t agree with every single rule, especially not with the one that demands software should always be easy to rollback, but they give you good food for thought for your own applications.

Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System

The earliest paper (1978!) to mention the notion of clocks as a means to track ordering of events in distributed systems, the predecessor to vector clocks, if you will. A must read.

Harvest, Yield, and Scalable Tolerant Systems

A recap of CAP, making the whole notion of it a bit more flexible by adding tuning knobs for graceful degradation. Hat tip to Coda Hale and his article “You can’t sacrifice partition tolerance” for pointing me to this.

Problems with CAP, and Yahoo’s little known NoSQL system

Also related to CAP, this article introduces the notion of PACELC, which basically adds latency to the CAP equation. CAP has been criticized quite a few times for being too strict in this regard, and while the name PACELC is a bit odd, the added notion of latency makes a lot of sense.

Replication and the latency-consistency tradeoff

Another one from Daniel Abadi, another one related to CAP, this time talking about replication, consistency, and latency.

It’s the latency, stupid!

Going further back in time, this paper talks about latency in all its glory. Sure, it talks about modem speed connections, but extrapolate that into today’s network bandwidth and you still have latency. Or you can read the next posts too.

It’s Still The Latency, Stupid…pt. 1 and It’s Still The Latency, Stupid…pt. 2

A more recent update on latency, because it still matters more than bandwidth.

Crash-only Software

I’ve been pondering fault-tolerant and cloud-ready systems for a while now, here’s one related to the topic, software that crashes as a means to make it more fault-tolerant.

Systems that Never Stop (video)

Great talk by Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, laying down six laws for fault-tolerant systems. All laws lead to Erlang obviously, but it all makes a lot of sense.

Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?

Related to Joe’s talk, this paper discusses hardware reduncancy and reliable storage by means of process pairs, modularity and transactions. Have yet to read this one, but going to be interesting thinking about how these ideas, stemming from hardware, apply to software and have been implemented by Erlang.

Working With Unix Processes

A little indie-published ebook on handling Unix processes. Code is focused on Ruby, but most if not all of the book is easily applicable to any other language or a basic Unix environment.

SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services

SEDA was an idea for web and application server concurrency based on using queues to condition and handle requests. While the idea has not exactly made it through, I found the model to be strikingly similar to the actor model, in a different way, but still very similar.

A Retrospective on SEDA

SEDA, ten years later, by the author of the original paper. I gotta say, he talks a lot what they got wrong, but I for one think SEDA had a pretty big impact on the bigger picture of web application architecture. Probably something worth discussing in a separate post.

Why Events Are A Bad Idea

A paper comparing threads and events for highly concurrent servers. I’d recommend taking this with a grain of salt. A lot has changed since this paper was written, but what I like about reading papers like this is that it gives you a historic perspective, same for SEDA.

Understanding Virtual Memory

Nice summary of how virtual memory works on Linux.

The Declarative Imperative: Experiences and Conjectures in Distributed Logic

To be honest, this is a slightly confusing paper. It starts out modeling things in an oscure language called Datalog, but then dives into making some conjectures about distributed logic, which was to me the more interesting part.

A brief history of Consensus, 2PC and Transaction Commit

This article is full of gold. An extraordinarily compact view on the topic, but with an abundance of links to papers to dive deeper.

Going to keep posting reading lists like this in the future. So much good stuff to read out there. Lots of great knowledge collected in papers.

Last but not least, why not add the Riak Handbook to your reading list as well?