Great stuff. I'm watching the durable execution space closely and personally I'm quite bullish on it. I'll be writing my own thoughts on durable execution soon. - ThreadSky

vanlightly.bsky.social • 35 days ago

Great stuff. I'm watching the durable execution space closely and personally I'm quite bullish on it. I'll be writing my own thoughts on durable execution soon.

Reposted from Stephan Ewen

𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐋𝐨𝐠

Here is an idea on how to drastically 𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 in distributed apps.

A fun way to look at this is similar to the idea of Turning the Database Inside Out - like Turning the Microservice Inside Out.

restate.dev/blog/every-s...

👇

Comments

joehellerstein.bsky.social•35 days ago

A muddled post at best. A sequential log *is* a point of coordination. It doesn't avoid coordination as claimed, it just centralizes it in 1 service (and arguably encourages overuse). Coordination avoidance is orthogonal: discover when global ordering is not needed. Ie avoidance avoids the log!

vanlightly.bsky.social•35 days ago

I think coordination avoidance is perhaps unfortunate wording, as Restate and others act as orchestrators (aka coordinators), as you say. From a practical sense, I think the idea is to remove coordination from the minds of the developer (rather than remove coordination altogether).

vanlightly.bsky.social•35 days ago

I definitely see one of the dangers is overuse. Right now I'm looking at durable ex frameworks such as Restate being used as a kind of targeted orchestration, rather than a universal middleware.

stephanewen.bsky.social•34 days ago

That is exactly right - what would be a better term? There is some simplification of the coordination happening here, because it centralizes it - like updating the state under a lock.

vanlightly.bsky.social•33 days ago

That's a good question and one that needs some thought. I'll see if I can address this when I write about my thoughts on durable execution.

stephanewen.bsky.social•34 days ago

That's a fair comment - maybe the better way to phrase this is replacing different forms of coordination with multiple independent systems, with one type of coordination, which can be also pretty transparently abstracted in the application, so you keep coordination out of your code.
Would that work?

joehellerstein.bsky.social•31 days ago

I think “getting all of your coordination under one roof” (or behind a unified api or something) is the message I’m hearing from you. Don’t know if that helps?

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