Millions of tiny databases. Fascinating, detailed review of a paper that describes Amazon’s Physalia, a distributed configuration store designed to provide extremely high availability coordination for Elastic Block Store replication. My eyebrows raised at “Physalia is designed to offer consistency and high-availability, even under network partitions.” since that’s such a blatant violation of CAP theorem, but it later justifies it like so: “One desirable property therefore, is that in the event of a partition, a client’s Physalia database will be on the same side of the partition as the client. Clever placement of cells across nodes can maximise the chances of this.”
Recent articles
- AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects - 27th March 2023
- I built a ChatGPT plugin to answer questions about data hosted in Datasette - 24th March 2023
- Weeknotes: AI won't slow down, a new newsletter and a huge Datasette refactor - 22nd March 2023
- Don't trust AI to talk accurately about itself: Bard wasn't trained on Gmail - 22nd March 2023
- A conversation about prompt engineering with CBC Day 6 - 18th March 2023
- Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85,000 and run it in a browser? - 17th March 2023