To find out when I write something new, sign up to receive an email notification , follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon , or subscribe to the RSS feed .
Visit martin.kleppmann.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Dec 2010 – Dec 2025
Software Engineering 9Databases & Data 6Systems & Performance 5Career & Management 2AI & Machine Learning 2Web & Frontend 1
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
This blog post has been translated into Russian , Japanese , Chinese , and Chinese again . For more detail on problems with CAP, and a proposal for an alternative, please see my paper A Critique of the CAP Theorem .
Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?
Having spent a lot of the last few years worrying about the scalability of data-heavy applications like Rapportive , I have started to get the feeling that maybe we have all been “doing it wrong”. Maybe what we consider to be “state of the art” application architecture is actually holding us back.
Keynote at 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS) , Online (originally planned to be in Milan, Italy), July 2021.