3 posts tagged with "distributed systems"

I want you to imagine what life was like before we had object storage. Uploading files was a custom process. If you wanted to scale, you ended up having to hire storage area network experts that built complicated systems with terms like “LUN” and “erasure coding”. Your application had to either shell out to an FTP server to handle uploads or put them alongside the source code. Above all though: everything had to be planned in advance. You had to do capacity planning so that you could know how much storage you needed to buy and when you needed to buy it. You couldn’t just insert a credit card and then get all the storage you wanted.

In 2006, Amazon invented the concept of object storage, fundamentally changing how applications work. Storage became a faucet. If you want more, you simply turn the knob. Bottomless storage was revolutionary, and now we’ve come to expect storage to be decoupled from physical hardware. S3 paved the way for seamless data management across any environment as long as it had a connection back to Amazon.

Twitter has been lit (well, not exactly lit, but let’s say there is a lot of enthusiasm) with posts about the recent announcement by AWS about support for Conditional Writes in S3. So I thought I would write something about it as well.

It’s all about concurrency and races.​

Introduction​

I admit it. My first Tigris blog post about Eager and Lazy caching was kind of basic. It was important to cover the ground-work. The CDN aspect is important and I do like the summon-your-data pre-fetch header a lot. Now we get to the significantly more disruptive stuff. The things that while Tigris is an S3-compatible API it also provides features that enable entirely new use-cases and push the boundaries of what you can do with object storage. Let's see if we can't set your internal constraint-solver aflame with possibilities.