Leader/Follower relationship with Primary/Replicas

In most of distributed datastore systems, there are a lot of techical terms to describe the behavior of the system. While these terms, like, “Leader”, “Follower”, “Replication”, “Consistency”, etc., are widely used and helpful, what I feel missing are the details about internal relationship between these terms. Analogically, while the map of the field is great, it is also important to understand how the soil, water, and sunlight interact to help the plants grow. ...

November 10, 2025 · 5 min · Akshay Deshpande

Message delivery in Distributed Systems

In distributed systems, the principle of message passing between nodes is a core concept. But this leads to an inevitable question: How can we ensure that a message was successfully delivered to its destination? To address this, there are three types of delivery semantics commonly employed: • At Most Once • At Least Once • Exactly Once Each of these offers different guarantees and trade-offs when it comes to message delivery. Let’s break down each one: ...

November 17, 2024 · 4 min · Akshay Deshpande