Foundations of Scalable Systems

Part III. Scalable Distributed Databases

Part III takes us into the complex realm of scaling the data tier. This is where distributed systems theory is most prominent. As systems introduce data replicas to facilitate scalability, other system qualities such as availability and especially consistency must be addressed—these qualities are indelibly entwined in distributed data systems. I’ll motivate the need for the algorithms that make distributed databases function and sketch out some of the algorithms that are utilized. I’ll then illustrate how these algorithms are manifested in major distributed databases including MongoDB, Google Cloud Spanner, and Amazon DynamoDB.