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8. The Trouble with Distributed Systems

Hey I just met you The network’s laggy But here’s my data So store it maybe

​ — Kyle Kingsbury, Carly Rae Jepsen and the Perils of Network Partitions (2013)

A recurring theme in the last few chapters has been how systems handle things going wrong. For example, we discussed replica failover (“Handling Node Outages”), replication lag (“Problems with Replication Lag”), and con‐ currency control for transactions (“Weak Isolation Levels”). As we come to understand various edge cases that can occur in real systems, we get better at handling them.

However, even though we have talked a lot about faults, the last few chapters have still been too optimistic. The reality is even darker. We will now turn our pessimism to the maximum and assume that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.1 (Experienced systems operators will tell you that is a reasonable assumption. If you ask nicely, they might tell you some frightening stories while nursing their scars of past battles.)

Working with distributed systems is fundamentally different from writing software on a single computer—and the main difference is that there are lots of new and excit‐ ing ways for things to go wrong [1, 2]. In this chapter, we will get a taste of the prob‐ lems that arise in practice, and an understanding of the things we can and cannot rely on.

In the end, our task as engineers is to build systems that do their job (i.e., meet the guarantees that users are expecting), in spite of everything going wrong. In Chapter 9, we will look at some examples of algorithms that can provide such guarantees in a distributed system. But first, in this chapter, we must understand what challenges we are up against.

This chapter is a thoroughly pessimistic and depressing overview of things that may go wrong in a distributed system. We will look into problems with networks (“Unreliable Networks”); clocks and timing issues (“Unreliable Clocks”); and we’ll discuss to what degree they are avoidable. The consequences of all these issues are disorienting, so we’ll explore how to think about the state of a dis‐ tributed system and how to reason about things that have happened (“Knowledge, Truth, and Lies”).

……

Summary

In this chapter we have discussed a wide range of problems that can occur in dis‐ tributed systems, including:

  • Whenever you try to send a packet over the network, it may be lost or arbitrarily delayed. Likewise, the reply may be lost or delayed, so if you don’t get a reply, you have no idea whether the message got through.
  • A node’s clock may be significantly out of sync with other nodes (despite your best efforts to set up NTP), it may suddenly jump forward or back in time, and relying on it is dangerous because you most likely don’t have a good measure of your clock’s error interval.
  • A process may pause for a substantial amount of time at any point in its execu‐ tion (perhaps due to a stop-the-world garbage collector), be declared dead by other nodes, and then come back to life again without realizing that it was paused.

The fact that such partial failures can occur is the defining characteristic of dis‐ tributed systems. Whenever software tries to do anything involving other nodes, there is the possibility that it may occasionally fail, or randomly go slow, or not respond at all (and eventually time out). In distributed systems, we try to build tolerance of partial failures into software, so that the system as a whole may continue functioning even when some of its constituent parts are broken.

To tolerate faults, the first step is to detect them, but even that is hard. Most systems don’t have an accurate mechanism of detecting whether a node has failed, so most distributed algorithms rely on timeouts to determine whether a remote node is still available. However, timeouts can’t distinguish between network and node failures, and variable network delay sometimes causes a node to be falsely suspected of crash‐ ing. Moreover, sometimes a node can be in a degraded state: for example, a Gigabit network interface could suddenly drop to 1 Kb/s throughput due to a driver bug [94]. Such a node that is “limping” but not dead can be even more difficult to deal with than a cleanly failed node.

Once a fault is detected, making a system tolerate it is not easy either: there is no global variable, no shared memory, no common knowledge or any other kind of shared state between the machines. Nodes can’t even agree on what time it is, let alone on anything more profound. The only way information can flow from one node to another is by sending it over the unreliable network. Major decisions cannot be safely made by a single node, so we require protocols that enlist help from other nodes and try to get a quorum to agree.

If you’re used to writing software in the idealized mathematical perfection of a single computer, where the same operation always deterministically returns the same result, then moving to the messy physical reality of distributed systems can be a bit of a shock. Conversely, distributed systems engineers will often regard a problem as triv‐ ial if it can be solved on a single computer [5], and indeed a single computer can do a lot nowadays [95]. If you can avoid opening Pandora’s box and simply keep things on a single machine, it is generally worth doing so.

However, as discussed in the introduction to Part II, scalability is not the only reason for wanting to use a distributed system. Fault tolerance and low latency (by placing data geographically close to users) are equally important goals, and those things can‐ not be achieved with a single node.

In this chapter we also went on some tangents to explore whether the unreliability of networks, clocks, and processes is an inevitable law of nature. We saw that it isn’t: it is possible to give hard real-time response guarantees and bounded delays in net‐ works, but doing so is very expensive and results in lower utilization of hardware resources. Most non-safety-critical systems choose cheap and unreliable over expen‐ sive and reliable.

We also touched on supercomputers, which assume reliable components and thus have to be stopped and restarted entirely when a component does fail. By contrast, distributed systems can run forever without being interrupted at the service level, because all faults and maintenance can be handled at the node level—at least in theory. (In practice, if a bad configuration change is rolled out to all nodes, that will still bring a distributed system to its knees.)

This chapter has been all about problems, and has given us a bleak outlook. In the next chapter we will move on to solutions, and discuss some algorithms that have been designed to cope with all the problems in distributed systems.

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  1. With one exception: we will assume that faults are non-Byzantine (see “Byzantine Faults”). ↩︎