Where clocks disagree, networks partition, and nothing is as simple as it seems. Understanding the fundamental challenges of coordination across machines.
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Consistency, availability, partition tolerance — you can pick two, but which two matters more than you think.
How distributed nodes agree on a single value, and why getting this right is deceptively difficult.
When wall clocks can't be trusted, Lamport timestamps and vector clocks establish causal ordering.
Single-leader simplicity versus multi-leader and leaderless approaches — consistency guarantees and failure modes.
Hash-based, range-based, and directory-based partitioning. Rebalancing without downtime.
What happens when nodes don't just crash — they lie. Handling arbitrary failures in adversarial environments.