Peter Bourgon, Fastly
This talk explores the motivation, design, prototype, and optimization of OK Log, a distributed and coördination-free log system for big ol' (cloud-native) clusters.
We first motivate the need for a such a system, setting it apart from existing products like Elasticsearch. Then, we carve out a solution in the distributed systems space, paying due homage to the old gremlins of consistency and coördination. Finally, we review the component and architecture model, and demonstrate how it copes with typical operations and failure modes.
This talk is about an open-source product, but it is not a product pitch. Instead, it's meant to be a case study of a learning exercise: approaching a deceptively subtle problem domain from first principles, and using methodological software engineering to derive a solution. I hope it inspires others to reach for something more self-actualizing than the plumbing together of databases and message busses.
Peter Bourgon, Fastly
Peter Bourgon is a Go aficionado and is quite keen on distributed systems. He's written Go kit, a toolkit for microservices in Go, among several other OSS projects. He is a professional typist, and has typed for Bloomberg, SoundCloud, and Weaveworks; he currently types for Fastly, as a member of their Data infrastructure team.
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author = {Peter Bourgon},
title = {{OK} Log: Distributed and {Co{\"o}rdination-Free} Logging},
year = {2017},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}