Taming Distributed Architecture with Caitie McCaffrey

Distributed systems programming will always be a world of tradeoffs — there is no silver bullet in the future.

But life can be made easier with tactics such as the actor pattern and the use of conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs).

Caitie McCaffrey is a distributed systems engineer who currently works at Twitter. She previously worked on Halo 4 at Microsoft and 343 Industries.

At QCon San Francisco, she will be hosting the track Taming Distributed Architecture.

Questions

• Describe the service problems on Halo 4 launch day.
• How did a kill switch help the situation?
• Why are “implicit assumptions the killer of any distributed system”?
• Why did you use the actor model to build Halo 4 services?
• What is a conflict-free replicated data type?

Links

• Halo 4: High Demand with Low Latency and High Availability (YouTube)
• Caitie McCaffrey’s blog
• Conflict-free replicated data type
• Actor pattern

Jeff