How do you reason about a probabilistic distributed system?
In which I am stunted upon by coin flips Wasn’t too long ago that I felt pretty good about my knowledge of distributed systems. All someone really needed in order to understand them, I thought, was a thorough understanding of the paxos protocol and a willingless to reshape your brain in the image ...
Hasnain says:
This was a very engaging technical read.
“I didn’t dislike probability & statistics, I just tried to keep my distance as much as possible. All the algorithms in distributed systems I’d encountered so far involved nondeterminism, sure, but not probability. I’d assumed nondeterminism was just a more flexible way of reasoning about probability. This idea of mine would prove to be a source of great unnecessary confusion as I learned the art of reasoning about probabilistic distributed systems, so I’ll do you a favor and give you the core lesson of this entire post in one sentence:
You cannot model probability with nondeterminism, and you cannot model nondeterminism with probability.”
Posted on 2020-09-12T04:15:22+0000