Distributed systems have been there for a while now and there are well-known patterns already established when designing them. Today, we will discuss one of the popular patterns: “locks.” Simply put, locks are how processes gain exclusive access to a resource to perform a certain action. For example, imagine there are a bunch of Blobs in a storage account, and …
Read More »Caching Strategies for Resilient Distributed Systems
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. …
Read More »Understanding Leaderless Replication for Distributed Data
Leaderless replication is another fundamental replication approach for distributed systems. It alleviates problems of multi-leader replication while, at the same time, it introduces its own problems. Write conflicts in multi-leader replication are tackled in leaderless replication with quorum-based writes and systematic conflict resolution (e.g., version vectors). Cascading failures, synchronization overhead, and operational complexity can be handled in leaderless replication via …
Read More »Distributed Training at Scale
As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models grow in complexity, the computational resources required to train them increase exponentially. Training large models on vast datasets can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, often taking days or even weeks to complete on a single machine. This is where distributed training comes into play. By leveraging multiple computing resources, distributed …
Read More »Private Division Games including Tales of the Shire and Kerbal Space Program to Be Distributed by New Label From Annapurna Interactive’s Former Staff
In a rather unusual merging of two completely separate reported stories from last year, the former staff of Annapurna Interactive are seemingly preparing to take over the portfolio of shuttered indie label Private Division. At least some of the remaining Private Division employees are expected to be laid off in the process. This is according to a report from Bloomberg, …
Read More »How Distributed Customer Service Teams Improve Each Other’s Skills
This post is part of The Supportive, Mathew Patterson’s column for customer service professionals. Learn what The Supportive is, or browse through all of the posts from this series. Starting out in customer support, especially for complex or technical fields, can be tough. There is so much to learn, and no matter how good the onboarding sessions, video training, and documentation are, …
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