Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs

10 Consistency and atomicity in distributed systems

This chapter covers

• Traffic flow between microservices deployed to N nodes and a distributed database
• Applications that work correctly in a one-node scenario and evolving them to work properly on N nodes
• Differences between atomicity and consistency in your application’s environment

If we want our application to scale and run in a distributed environment, we need to design our code for that. Having a consistent view of the system is important and relatively easy to achieve if our application is deployed to one node and uses a standard database that works in a primary-secondary architecture. In such a context, a database transaction guarantees the atomicity of our operations. However, in reality, ...