Failure in the World of Distributed Systems
Explore the challenges of identifying failures in distributed systems, focusing on timeout mechanisms and failure detectors. Understand the trade-offs involved in detecting node crashes versus slow responses and how imperfect failure detectors contribute to solving consensus problems.
We should understand that it is challenging to identify failure because of all the characteristics of a distributed system that the Difficulties Designing Distributed Systems lesson described. One of them is the asynchronous nature of the network.
One reason for failure
The asynchronous nature of the network in a distributed system can make it very hard for us to differentiate between a crashed node and a node that is just really slow to respond to requests.
One mechanism to detect failure
Timeouts is the main mechanism we can use ...