Little things and big things: lessons for building large systems. Peter van Roy @Code BEAM Lite Sto

Keynote talk from 2023 Code BEAM Lite Stockholm- The Swedish Event for Erlang and Elixir Developers.

Designing systems at a bigger scale than what has been done before is hard. Past experience only goes so far. In this talk Peter van Roy gives some hard-earned lessons of system design, both little and big, that can keep your system working and save your sanity when you are building a big system.

He illustrates these lessons with examples taken from real systems. Some topics covered in the talk are: two rules that the system must always obey, why big buffers are bad, what happens when the system jumps off a cliff, how to avoid nondeterminism in distributed systems, understanding internal and external correlations, the right way to use time-outs, whether to mitigate or propagate (building on top of supervisor trees), and the importance of multiple timescales.
This talk is based on an ongoing project in collaboration with the company PNSol that is creating a comprehensive tutorial and tool support for large-scale system design.

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