Could distributed systems be taught from first principles…
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Could distributed systems be taught from first principles rather than from a catalogue of architectural mechanisms?
I've been thinking about this recently.
The existing literature on distributed systems is excellent. It explains the what and the how of mechanisms like replication, consensus, consistency models, logical clocks, sharding, and fault tolerance. Those concepts are essential, and they're taught exceptionally well.
But I wonder if there's room for another pedagogical approach—one that emphasizes why these mechanisms become necessary in the first place.
Imagine starting from an idealized world with instantaneous computation, infinite storage, unlimited compute, a perfect network, a single global clock, and no failures. Then, systematically removing those assumptions and replacing them with the constraints of reality. As each assumption falls away, the need for clocks, replication, consensus, and other mechanisms emerges naturally.
I've been experimenting with building a free crash course (text+video) around this idea. I'm not really looking for views as much as I am for feedback on the framework itself.
If you've learned, taught, or designed distributed systems, do you think this way of building intuition has merit? Where would you expect it to work well, and where do you think it would fall short?
I'm genuinely curious whether this is a useful complement to the way distributed systems are traditionally taught.
#technology
I've been thinking about this recently.
The existing literature on distributed systems is excellent. It explains the what and the how of mechanisms like replication, consensus, consistency models, logical clocks, sharding, and fault tolerance. Those concepts are essential, and they're taught exceptionally well.
But I wonder if there's room for another pedagogical approach—one that emphasizes why these mechanisms become necessary in the first place.
Imagine starting from an idealized world with instantaneous computation, infinite storage, unlimited compute, a perfect network, a single global clock, and no failures. Then, systematically removing those assumptions and replacing them with the constraints of reality. As each assumption falls away, the need for clocks, replication, consensus, and other mechanisms emerges naturally.
I've been experimenting with building a free crash course (text+video) around this idea. I'm not really looking for views as much as I am for feedback on the framework itself.
If you've learned, taught, or designed distributed systems, do you think this way of building intuition has merit? Where would you expect it to work well, and where do you think it would fall short?
I'm genuinely curious whether this is a useful complement to the way distributed systems are traditionally taught.
#technology
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