In my last post Bloom Filters: MathMania, we worked through the derivations for optimal number of bits to allocate and the right number of hash functions to use – striking a balance between space, computation, and false positives. But all of that math rested on one simple assumption: the set of…
How do modern databases and distributed systems ensure correctness while allowing operations to run concurrently? Two foundational guarantees — serializability and linearizability — offer different answers depending on whether you care about logical correctness or real-time visibility. In this post, we’ll explore what they are, how they differ, and why it’…
“Consistency” is one of those overloaded terms in computer science. It shows up in ACID transactions and in the CAP theorem, but it means very different things depending on the context. Let’s unpack the difference. Consistency in ACID In the ACID world, consistency is really about data integrity. It…
In any distributed system, services need to discover each other to be able to communicate. This requires a broker of sorts in place to which services could register themselves and be discovered by other services. This mechanism is what is known as Service Discovery and the most famous choice of…