Issue #21 - A Tale of Two Dimensions
Synchronous vs asynchronous & sequential vs concurrent
Another weekend, another weekend read, this time all about a Tale of Two Dimensions
I am writing a book on Thinking in Distributed Systems. 12 chapters, one chapter per month, full of diagrams, illustrations, and examples, all about distributed systems.
This weekend, I am recommending my own blog post A Tale of Two Dimensions. The blog post explores distributed systems through the lens of two fundamental dimensions:
synchronous versus asynchronous and
sequential versus concurrent.
The post starts by introducing a distributed system as a collection of communicating processes and that we may reason about a distributed system in discrete steps, with either a process or the network taking a step.
Subsequently, the post differentiates between the system level and the process level. At the system level, we reason about the collection of processes, while at the process level, we reason about an individual process.
The post covers
System Level • Synchronous vs Asynchronous,
System Level • Sequential vs Concurrent,
Process Level • Synchronous vs Asynchronous, and
Process Level • Sequential vs Concurrent
Additionally, the post covers two bonus rounds
Concurrency & Determinism and
Concurrency & Parallelism
Different authors think differently about terminology. I do not want to claim that my thoughts are correct and others’ are not correct. Instead, I want to share my mental model, which is designed to be minimal and self consistent.
This mental model helps me to reason about distributed systems with confidence. May this mental model help you as well.
Happy Reading
A Tale of Two Dimensions
Dominik Tornow
In this post, we will explore distributed systems through the lens of two fundamental dimensions: synchronous versus asynchronous and sequential versus concurrent. Different authors think differently about terminology. I do not want to claim that my thoughts are correct and others’ are not correct. Instead, I want to share my mental model, which is designed to be minimal and self consistent. This mental model helps me to reason about distributed systems with confidence. May this mental model help you as well.