Distributed Computing Dealing with Time and Failure in the Wild by Ryan Lemmer

There is a growing need for scalable, realtime business systems that are continuously running and highly-available. Two very different frameworks/approaches you could use to build such systems are Storm and Akka.

Systems created with Storm or Akka are distributed, at runtime, on as many machines as you choose. The inherent concurrency implied by this brings the issues of State, Time and Failure into sharp focus. Functional programming has much to say about dealing with state and time; not surprisingly, both Storm and Akka have strong roots in functional languages (for Storm it is Clojure, and for Akka, Scala).

In this talk we'll explore the core concepts and challenges of distributed computation; the role of functional programming in concurrent distributed computing; we'll take a look at Storm and Akka, by example, and see that as different as these 2 approaches are, the underlying difficulties of distributed computation remains evident in both: dealing with time, and dealing with failure.