Engineering Insights

Node.js 12.19.0 (LTS)

Pitfalls of isolation levels in distributed databases

The more loosely coupled components are in a distributed system, the better it scales. This rule applies to distributed databases, too, and the isolation level plays a big part in this. This post attempts to explain what these isolation levels mean and the tradeoffs between them. We also give you recommendations on how to choose the isolation level best suited to your needs. There exists a set of ANSI Standards for isolation. There is also a critique about those standards explaining the ambiguit

MySQL semi-sync replication: durability consistency and split brains

MySQL semi-sync is a plugin mechanism on top of asynchronous replication, that can offer better durability and even consistency (term defined later). It helps in high availability solutions, but can in itself reduce availability. We look at some basics and follow up to present scenarios that require higher level intervention to ensure availability and to avoid split brains from taking place. I recommend reading this semi-sync blog post by Jean-François Gagné (aka JFG), which illustrates the inte

Node.js 14.13.0 (Current)

Consensus algorithms at scale: Part 3 - Use cases

If you’re still catching up, you can find links to each article in the series at the bottom of this article. Recap of parts 1-3 Here is a recap of what we covered in the last blog: Durability is the main reason why we want to use a consensus system. Since Durability is use-case dependent, we made it an abstract requirement requiring the consensus algorithms to assume nothing about the durability requirements. We started off with the original properties of a consensus system as defined by Paxos a

Node.js 14.12.0 (Current)

OpenAI licenses GPT-3 technology to Microsoft

OpenAI has agreed to license GPT-3 to Microsoft for their own products and services.

Orchestrator failure detection and recovery: New Beginnings

Orchestrator is an open source MySQL replication topology management and high availability solution. Vitess has recently integrated orchestrator as a native component of its infrastructure to achieve reliable failover, availability, and topology resolution of its clusters. This post first illustrates the core logic of orchestrator’s failure detection, and proceeds to share how the new integration adds new failure detection and recovery scenarios, making orchestrator’s operation goal-oriented.__