Consensus Protocols in OTP | Dániel Szoboszlay | Code BEAM V

TALK LEVEL: ADVANCED

Are consensus algorithms in OTP based on Paxos? Raft?

A home-grown solution?

Are they the secret sauce of the language or its dark secret instead?

Are global locks and Mnesia transactions as reliable as you believe?

Consensus protocols are essential to distributed systems, yet they are always constrained by theoretical limits. Trade-offs between consistency and ensuring progress are inevitable.

This talk will peek into OTP libraries such as "global" to better understand their guarantees and failure modes.

THIS TALK IN THREE WORDS

Consensus

Protocol

Analysis

OBJECTIVES

• Help developers better understand the capabilities and limits of key OTP modules driving distributed systems.
• Demonstrate the importance of exploring failure modes.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Developers of distributed systems who are interested in guarantees, failure modes and edge cases.