Coordination
ZooKeeper: Coordination for Distributed Systems
A practical explanation of ZooKeeper as a coordination service for leader election, locks, and shared metadata.
Benchmarking
YCSB: A Useful Benchmark for Data Stores
How to think about YCSB as a benchmark for comparing data stores under repeatable workloads.
Transactions
XID: One Transaction Id Across Systems
How a globally unique transaction id helps operators and systems connect all records from the same distributed transaction.
Durability
Write Ahead Log: Write Intent Before State
Why a write ahead log makes crash recovery and replication safer.
Versioning
Vector Clocks: Track Which Version Saw Which
A simple explanation of vector clocks and how they detect concurrent updates.
Replication
Update Propagation: Moving a Change Across Copies
How updates move from a source of truth to caches, read models, indexes, and other replicas.
Transactions
Two Phase Commit: Coordinating a Commit
A practical explanation of two phase commit, prepare, commit, and why the coordinator matters.
Transactions
Serialized Transactions: One Clear Order
How serialized transactions make concurrent work behave as if it ran one transaction at a time.
Consensus
Raft Consensus: Leader and Followers in Plain English
A practical explanation of Raft consensus using leader election and replicated log commitment.