RECENT ROTATIONS

At Rotational, we use gRPC quite a bit. It’s great for specifying network APIs, but can challenge us to find new ways to thoroughly test the code. Follow along with this post to learn two ways of using mocking to test gRPC services!

Two decades ago Clive Humby proclaimed “data is the new oil”, marking an economic shift towards data products. But, if the intervening years have taught us anything, it’s to think of data more like fresh fruit.

Have you always wanted to build an event-driven system, but couldn’t justify spending the cognitive overhead or platform engineering costs? Introducing Ensign – eventing made easy!

Double-checked locking is a common mechanism to avoid race conditions when using read and write locks. Unfortunately, as with nearly all things related to concurrency, it is easy to get wrong or forget.

If you think farmwork and software don’t have much in common, think again!

In the third and final part of our series exploring the popular consensus algorithm we’ll finally explore how Raft handles leader election, and in doing so discover how Raft is so incredibly resilient.

Event-driven architectures (EDA) are enjoying a resurgence in interest due to many organizations’ need to accelerate rapid prototyping and get by with smaller, more cross-functional teams. In this post, we’ll demonstrate how to …

In our first installment on how to implement the famous Raft algorithm, we introduced the log: an ordered sequence of operations that serves as the core data structure for distributed consensus. In this second part, we’ll demonstrate …

If nothing else, the last year has brought the winds of change to the tech sector. From high-visibility layoff cycles at FAANGs and crypto companies, to turbulence in our social media infrastructure, to pop culture’s discovery of deep …

With all the blockchain breaches and social media escapades, there’s been an awful lot of buzz about distributed systems lately. But how many of us really understand how they work? Let’s dive in together…

Serialization format is an often-overlooked engineering step that could make your application as slow as a turtle or as speedy as a cheetah!

In this post we’ll explore the question, how does a distributed system actually die?