Idempotency, Replication, and Recovery Models
Distributed systems are very common in modern software architectures. The challenges of ensuring data consistency, fault tolerance, and availability become critical. This chapter is going to cover three key concepts that help address these challenges:
- Idempotency
- Replication
- Recovery models
Idempotency is a fundamental non-functional system property that ensures operations can be executed safely and repeatedly without causing unintended side effects. In a distributed system, network failures and system crashes are common. Idempotency is essential for maintaining data integrity and consistency. By designing operations to be idempotent, engineers can build more resilient and fault-tolerant systems that can recover from partial failures without compromising the overall system state.
Replication, on the other hand, is a technique that’s used to improve the availability and durability of data in distributed systems...
