Snapshots

  • Reading Group. Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems

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    On Wednesday we kicked off a new set of papers in the reading group. We have started with one of the classical foundational papers in distributed systems and looked at the Chandy-Lamport token-based distributed snapshot algorithm. The basic idea here is to capture the state of distributed processes and channels by “flushing” the messages out…

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  • Monitoring with Retroscope: Detecting Invariant Violations

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    Earlier I briefly mentioned Retroscope, our distributed snapshot library that makes taking non-blocking, unplanned consistent global distributed snapshots possible. However, these snapshots are only good if we know how to use them well. Of course the most obvious use case is just a data backup, and despite it being an important application for snapshots, I…

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  • Globally Consistent Distributed Snapshots with Retroscope

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    Taking a consistent snapshot of a distributed system is no trivial task for the reasons of asynchrony between the nodes in the system. As the state of each machine changes in response to incoming external messages or internal events, each node may produce a log of such state changes. With the log abstraction, the problem…

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