Garanti del Talento

dgt_sre08 – Distributed systems and consensus protocols

Module Title: dgt_sre08 – Distributed systems and consensus protocols

Description:

“Distributed systems and consensus protocols” dgt_sre08 is a module on distributed systems, intended for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). This module examines the mechanisms that ensure reliability, consistency and fault tolerance within these systems, with consensus protocols at its center.

Overview:

Distributed systems are used to support large-scale applications with high availability and resilience. Understanding how these systems achieve consensus is crucial for any SRE tasked with maintaining their stability and performance. This module explores the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of the consensus algorithms that form the backbone of many modern distributed services.

The theory here is substantial, and it is what makes the practice possible. In the labs you ask the machine in natural language to bring up a three-node etcd or Vault cluster, then to isolate the leader or stop a node; it carries out the operation and reports member status and logs, and you use what you know about terms, elections and quorum to predict what should happen, check that it did, and catch the machine when it misreads the cluster’s state.

Module Objectives:

  • Understand Distributed Systems: Study the principles and challenges associated with designing and managing distributed systems.

  • Explore Consensus Protocols: Learn about various consensus protocols, focusing on their roles in achieving agreement among distributed nodes despite failures and network partitions.

  • Examine RAFT Protocol: Study the RAFT consensus algorithm, analyzing its design and observing its behavior in real-world systems such as etcd and HashiCorp Vault through experiments you direct in natural language.

Key Topics:

  1. Introduction to Distributed Systems:
  2. Fundamental concepts of distributed computing

  3. Challenges in building reliable distributed systems

  4. Consensus in Distributed Systems:

  5. Importance of consensus protocols in maintaining consistency

  6. Exploring the CAP theorem and its implications

  7. RAFT Consensus Algorithm:

  8. Detailed examination of RAFT’s design principles
  9. Comparison with other consensus algorithms like Paxos

  10. Practical insights into how RAFT is implemented in etcd and Vault

  11. Case Studies and Applications:

  12. In-depth analysis of etcd’s use of RAFT for key-value storage in Kubernetes

  13. Understanding HashiCorp Vault’s implementation of RAFT for secure secret management

  14. Best Practices and Challenges:

  15. Strategies for deploying and maintaining distributed systems based on consensus protocols, and how to specify them to the machine
  16. Handling common challenges such as network partitions and node failures by simulating them through natural-language instructions and verifying the cluster’s recovery

Target Audience:

This module is intended for SREs, system architects, software engineers and IT professionals who work with distributed systems and need to understand the role consensus algorithms play in their reliability. It is suitable both for those new to these concepts and for those with prior experience.

Module Outcomes:

By the end of this module, participants will have:

  • A thorough understanding of how consensus protocols operate within distributed systems
  • Practical experience in directing the operation and troubleshooting of RAFT-based systems like etcd and Vault in natural language, and in verifying the machine’s diagnosis
  • The ability to design and manage highly reliable distributed systems

The students can push their exercises to the Academy DevOps & SRE Git project. For this module, create a folder with your username as its name in the following subfolder: https://github.com/Garanti-Del-Talento/gdt_academy