Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Building Distributed Graph-Processing Systems

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

- Leslie Lamport

The master/worker pattern is a popular approach for building fault-tolerant, distributed systems. The first part of this chapter explores this pattern in depth with a focus on some of the more challenging aspects of distributed systems, such as node discovery and error handling.

In the second part of this chapter, we will apply the master/worker pattern to build, from scratch, a distributed graph-processing system that can handle massive graphs whose size exceeds the memory capacity of most modern compute nodes. Finally, in the last part of this ...