dslabs

You'd define invariants that must be met. This has been done before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search-based_software_engineer... e.g. testing implementations of Paxos: https://github.com/emichael/dslabs At Facebook: https://engineering.fb.com/2018/05/02/developer-tools/sapien... As an example, your search graph might define your nodes as possible application states and the edges as actions to transition to a new state. Some edges might be "create a post" and "change post privacy settings". You might then define an invariant saying "after a user creates a post the new post is in their follower's timeline if privacy settings allow". Your search might eventually come across some set of actions that lead to this invariant being violated which is a discovered bug, e.g. if a user A creates a post -> user A changes settings to private -> use

The best approach is to implement Paxos. I suggest https://github.com/emichael/dslabs. It will take 100-200 hours to fully implement with all tests passing.

I recently took a Distributed Systems course, and I also thought it was very interesting and unexpected how in the most basic form of Paxos, there is no concept of node roles or hierarchy like leader/follower, master/replica, etc. The base case is that all nodes have the same replicated log, and are "writers" capable of initiating changes to the log. This youtube video was particularly helpful in learning about consensus algorithms, specifically Paxos/MultiPaxos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsBg0AO6o John Ousterhout (author of Raft) walks through Paxos/MultiPaxos as outlined by Leslie Lamport, and then talks about a series of optimizations to improve performance. One key optimization is transitioning from performing consensus on a single log-slot proposal, to the entire log-slot altogether, which mitigates failed consensus rounds, a

I took a Distributed Systems course at Georgia Tech's OMSCS program this spring, which used a learning framework from the University of Washington: https://github.com/emichael/dslabs You make a key-value store using multiple techniques, from a basic single-node KV store, to a primary/replica, to PAXOS, to sharded PAXOS (which is essentially what AWS DynamoDB is, minus all of the features they've added since launch). It's written in modern Java, and the tests that validate your implementation are very thorough. I learned a ton from this, although I gave up at the last milestone because my grade was satisfactory in the class :) Alternatively, you could enroll in the OMSCS and take the course yourself. It's only $600 per class at a top-10 school! The application is very easy and they accept anyone who has a reasonable chance of completing th

This might interest you as well: https://github.com/emichael/dslabs That distributed systems lab is what Georgia Tech's Distributed System lab[0] is based on, at least when I took the course back in 2021 [0] - https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7210-distributed-computing

If building a distributed KV store interests you, you might want to check out Georgia Tech's OMSCS Distributed Computing course: https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7210-distributed-computing . While rewarding, this class was hell and still gives me nightmares.... By the way, the course is built on top of Distributed System's lab: https://github.com/emichael/dslabs