In this article I argue that depending on how one programs one’s client, one can build a Consistent and Partition Tolerant or Available and Partition Tolerant system on top of Bitcoin or really...
Block chains can be strongly consistent but not in the normal deterministic sense we are used to from consensus protocols like Paxos. Instead the strong consistency is probabilistic. That is, if ...
https://www.goland.org/why_block_chains_are_strongly_consistent/
It turns out that building a distributed database with ACID behavior (aka a block chain) isn’t easy, it requires a lot of code and a lot of processing. As a result block chains like Bitcoin can...
https://www.goland.org/off_chain_storage_and_the_enterprise/
My day job has required me to look into issues related to using the block chain in the enterprise. This lead me to a simple question - why would an enterprise be interested in the block chain for...
I was reading through Paxos made simple and I really wished there were state diagrams to help explicate the protocol. So I wrote them up and share them below. Please keep in mind that the diagram...
https://www.goland.org/state_diagrams_for_paxos_made_simple/
So let's say I want to build a nice highly consistent multi-data center store, something like Megastore. Most everyone at this point has something like Bigtable already deployed in their data cen...
Measuring the performance of services is tricky. There is an almost irresistible desire to measure average performance. But measuring service performance using averages is pretty much guaranteed ...
My technical wanderings of late at Microsoft have taken me into the realm of massively distributed storage. Of course, I've been here before but this time I need to bring some other folks along. ...
Eran's latest article raises a number of specific security threats by way of arguing that bearer tokens are irredeemably insecure. In this article I examine the attacks Eran calls out and demonst...
https://www.goland.org/are_bearer_tokens_unsafe_at_any_speed/
OAuth's current access dance is based getting a request token that is later exchanged for an access token. Introducing the request token takes what could have been a 4 round trip protocol and mak...