System Design#4: Understanding the Actor model to build non-blocking, high-throughput distributed systems
This is the fourth post in the system design series where I discuss the intricacies of designing distributed scalable systems and the related concepts. This will help you immensely with your software architecture and system design interview rounds, in addition to helping you become a better…
Technical Consultant: How can I become one? Explained with an example
This write-up offers insight into technical consulting. You’ll understand what a technical consultant is, the skills required to be one and how you can become one. So, without further ado. Let’s get started. What is a technical consultant? A technical consultant, an IT consultant or…
IT consultant: How do I become one? Explained with a real-world use case
This article takes a deep dive into the world of IT consulting. I’ll discuss what an IT (Information Technology) consultant is, their responsibilities, the skills required, how you can become one and more. So, without further ado. Let’s get started. What does an IT consultant…
Software architecture course – From zero to mastering the fundamentals
If you are looking for a course on software architecture that’ll help you get a grip on the domain. Let me tell you about the Zero to Software Architect learning track that I’ve authored, consisting of three courses that helps you learn the domain starting…
Spaghetti code explained with a real-world use case
What is the Spaghetti code? Spaghetti code also referred to as the big ball of mud, is code without a definite structure and resembles spaghetti. This form of code is tightly coupled, hard to maintain, and refactor and a nightmare for the devs working on…
Distributed Systems and Scalability Feed
Facebook photo storage architecture
Facebook built Haystack, an object storage system designed for storing photos on a large scale. The platform stores over 260 billion images which amounts to over 20 petabytes of data. One billion new photos are uploaded each week which is approx—60 terabytes of data. At peak, the platform serves over one million images per second.
In the original NAS-based photo storage architecture, Facebook faced throughput and latency issues as the photos and the associated metadata lookups in NAS caused excessive disk operations almost upto ten just for retrieving a single image.
Tail latency in distributed systems
Tail latency is that tiny percentage of responses from a system that are the slowest in comparison to most of the responses. They are often called as the 98th or 99th percentile response times. This may seem insignificant at first but for large applications like LinkedIn, this has noticeable effects. This could mean that for a page having a million views per day 10,000 of those page views would experience the delay. Read how LinkedIn deals with longtail network latencies.
There can be multiple causes of tail latency: increasing load on the system, complex and distributed systems, application bottlenecks, slow network, slow disk access and more. Read more on it.
RobinHood: Tail latency-aware caching
RobinHood is a research caching system for application servers in large distributed systems having diverse backends. The cache system dynamically partitions the cache space between different backend services and continuously optimizes the partition sizes.
Microsoft research has a talk on getting rid of long-tail latencies.
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