Is there anybody out there? by Manuel Bernhardt

Modern applications are faced with the expectation of being always up. As a result, an increasing amount of businesses are transitioning to modern architectures such as the one of reactive microservice-based systems. As compelling as this sounds, this also means to embrace distribution so as to ensure fault-tolerance and scalability. This also means embracing the uncertainty and nondeterminism that comes with building networked applications: changes in link quality, network partitions and outages of individual nodes are scenarios that need to be addressed first-hand when designing such systems.
In this talk you will learn about the fundamental mechanisms that clustered systems need in order to operate in this uncertain world, such as failure detection, gossip-based cluster state propagation, split brain resolution and convergent replicated data types (CRDTs). We will look at these mechanisms in the context of Akka Cluster.
By the end of this talk you should have a solid understanding of the trade-offs that need to be made when building clustered applications. You will also get the sense that a networked application is not just one application, but the cooperation between individual processes that need to probe for each other’s availability and decide what to do when one or more of them are maybe unavailable all while not being able to talk with one another.