How can you improve the reliability of distributed systems?

Distributed systems are composed of multiple independent nodes that communicate and coordinate to achieve a common goal. However, such systems face many challenges, such as network failures, node crashes, inconsistent data, concurrency issues, and malicious attacks. How can you improve the reliability of distributed systems, which is the ability to deliver correct and consistent service despite these faults and uncertainties? Here are some strategies and techniques that can help you design and implement more reliable distributed systems.

1 Fault tolerance

Fault tolerance is the property of a system that enables it to continue operating correctly even when some of its components fail. To achieve fault tolerance, you need to identify the possible failure modes and scenarios of your system, and design mechanisms to detect, isolate, and recover from them. For example, you can use redundancy, replication, checkpoints, backups, and consensus protocols to increase the availability and durability of your system's data and services. You can also use timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and fallbacks to handle network failures and prevent cascading failures.

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Andrew MacKay
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In my experience, a few key areas require special attention when designing a distributed scalable system. Deciding on a Shared nothing architecture (no master node) or a quorum design where nodes vote for control of the cluster. A combination of both architectures can offer the simplicity of a shared nothing and the resilience and predictability of quorum design. All architectures will be impacted by race conditions. This is where two processes vote or take control of a function at nearly the same time. These conditions are hard to debug. Software restarts and initialization routines make the probability of race condition almost guaranteed. Persistent shared storage is needed for checkpoints that allow processing to resume

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Dragos Cristea

Sr. Product Line Manager, Network Control and Automation at Nokia. Nokia Ombuds leader
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Process interlock should be one design principle. At least the known processes should not try to "step over each other" when there is a hierarchy of processes and contention for resources. Logging should be done for each of the cluster members' apps, with precision clocking, so if a timeline needs to be established, to be able to do that irrespective of the failing app and cluster. Usually failures like these are not "shot in the head" where the failure is immediate; it is more "shot in the heart" where there are some extra steps recorded past the actual failure - helping to better identify the failure moment - and culprit[s].

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Asif Shafi

Senior Automation Engineer at General Dynamics Mission Systems
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Although an expensive proposition, I always try to leverage cloud providers and their services to add redundancy to the system. This methodology provides a solid fall back against complete network outage, ISP outage, as well as any security incident which might cause a loss of functionality for mission critical systems

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Muhammad Adeel Qamar

Manager IT Infrastructure
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Redundancy and replication are two fundamental concepts used in distributed systems to enhance reliability. Redundancy involves duplicating critical system components, such as servers, storage devices, or network links, so that if one fails, the redundant component can seamlessly take over.

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Davoud Teimouri

Senior Datacenter Expert
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Fault Tolerance comes with some definitions and also some popular features or solutions in infrastructure platforms such as VMware vSphere. Some of solutions are very expensive or complicated for Fault Tolerance such as EMC VPLEX. But you can save your business from failures by implementing some basic solutions such as clustering.

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2 Testing and debugging

Testing and debugging are essential activities to ensure the quality and correctness of your system's functionality and performance. However, testing and debugging distributed systems can be challenging, as they involve multiple concurrent and asynchronous processes, complex interactions, non-deterministic behaviors, and partial failures. To overcome these challenges, you need to use appropriate tools and methods to simulate, monitor, trace, and analyze your system's behavior under various conditions and scenarios. For example, you can use unit testing, integration testing, load testing, fault injection, logging, distributed tracing, and debugging tools to identify and fix bugs and bottlenecks in your system.

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3 Configuration management

Configuration management is the process of managing the settings and parameters of your system's components and environment. It includes tasks such as provisioning, deploying, updating, scaling, and monitoring your system's nodes and resources. Configuration management can help you improve the reliability of your system by ensuring that your system is consistent, secure, and adaptable to changing requirements and demands. For example, you can use configuration management tools, such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or Terraform, to automate and orchestrate your system's configuration and deployment processes, and reduce human errors and inconsistencies.

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Davoud Teimouri

Senior Datacenter Expert
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You can use configuration management tools for preparing virtual servers or physical servers regarding to your service's needs. Ansible is one of most popular configuration management tools, Ansible Tower and Oracle Automation Manager are web-based management for Ansible and working is so easier when there is a GUI for administration. You can update multiple servers or change specific settings on multiple servers so easily.

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4 Security and privacy

Security and privacy are the aspects of your system that protect its data and services from unauthorized access, modification, or disclosure. They are crucial for ensuring the trustworthiness and integrity of your system and its users. To improve the security and privacy of your system, you need to implement measures to prevent, detect, and respond to potential threats and attacks. For example, you can use encryption, authentication, authorization, auditing, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to secure your system's communication channels, data storage, and access control.

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Davoud Teimouri

Senior Datacenter Expert
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Security solutions can be achieved easy or by spending much money. So, you need to find what do you need for securing services. Sometimes attackers are outside, many times attackers are inside. Sometimes you need to activate firewall on Operating System but sometimes you need to do much more. You can implement different solutions and strategies to keep services "more secure".

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5 Scalability and performance

Scalability and performance are the characteristics of your system that determine how well it can handle increasing workloads and demands. They are important for ensuring the responsiveness and efficiency of your system and its users. To improve the scalability and performance of your system, you need to optimize your system's design and implementation to reduce latency, bandwidth, and resource consumption. For example, you can use load balancing, caching, compression, batching, and parallelism to distribute and process your system's workloads and requests more effectively.

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6 Documentation and communication

Documentation and communication are the activities of creating and sharing information and knowledge about your system's architecture, design, implementation, operation, and maintenance. They are essential for ensuring the clarity and consistency of your system and its stakeholders. To improve the documentation and communication of your system, you need to use appropriate formats, tools, and channels to document and communicate your system's goals, requirements, specifications, assumptions, decisions, and changes. For example, you can use diagrams, code comments, README files, wikis, blogs, and newsletters to document and communicate your system's features and updates.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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How can you improve the reliability of distributed systems?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1 Fault tolerance

2 Testing and debugging

3 Configuration management

4 Security and privacy

5 Scalability and performance

6 Documentation and communication

7 Here’s what else to consider

Operating Systems

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How can you improve the reliability of distributed systems?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1 Fault tolerance

2 Testing and debugging

3 Configuration management

4 Security and privacy

5 Scalability and performance

6 Documentation and communication

7 Here’s what else to consider

Operating Systems

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