Designing in a Distributed World - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 26

Designing distributed systems requires an understanding of the time it takes various
operations to run so that time-sensitive processes can be designed to meet their latency
budget.
Exercises
1. What is distributed computing?
2. Describe the three major composition patterns in distributed computing.
3. What are the three patterns discussed for storing state?
4. Sometimes a master server does not reply with an answer but instead replies with
where the answer can be found. What are the benefits of this method?
5. Section 1.4 describes a distributed file system, including an example of how read-
ing terabytes of data would work. How would writing terabytes of data work?
6. Explain the CAP Principle. (If you think the CAP Principle is awesome, read “The
Part-Time Parliament” ( Lamport & Marzullo 1998 ) and “Paxos Made Simple”
( Lamport 2001 ) .)
7. What does it mean when a system is loosely coupled? What is the advantage of
these systems?
8. Give examples of loosely and tightly coupled systems you have experience with.
What makes them loosely or tightly coupled?
9. How do we estimate how fast a system will be able to process a request such as re-
trieving an email message?
10. In Section 1.7 three design ideas are presented for how to process email deletion
requests. Estimate how long the request will take for deleting an email message for
each of the three designs. First outline the steps each would take, then break each
one into individual operations until estimates can be created.