CRDTs and Strong Eventual Consistency: A Foundation for Distributed Databases
By
tempodox
A good honest bake. Not flashy, but you'll finish the whole bagel.
Summary
This article explains CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) as a tool for achieving Strong Eventual Consistency in distributed systems. It introduces the concept of CRDTs as data structures that can be replicated across multiple nodes, edited independently, and merged without conflicts. The author argues that while collaborative document editing is a common use case, the major application lies in distributed databases. The article begins defining Eventual Consistency with its two key properties: Eventual Delivery and Eventual Convergence.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledCRDTs. Data structures that can be replicated across multiple nodes, edited independently, merged back together, and it all just works.
But collaborative document editing and multiplayer TODO lists are just the tip of the iceberg - I believe the big application is distributed databases, and for that we need to talk about consistency.
CRDTs are a tool for Strong Eventual Consistency.
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