DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Dr. Shahid Naseem

Assistant Professor (IT)
Division of Science & Technology
University of Education, Township Campus, Lahore
Shahid.Naseem@ue.edu.pk

Superior University, Gold Campus

Harvest/Yield
• Distributed systems can be evaluated by its
decision to reduce harvest/yield under network
partitions.
• Some architectures utilize different harvest/yield
tradeoffs in individual components.
• A better representation of the kind of tradeoffs
one will make compared to the CAP Theorem.

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Harvest
• The completeness of the response to a query.
• Total data available/Total data=Harvest
• Harvest is an abstract idea-depends on what you
define as completeness.
Examples:
 Pagination on large datasets.
 Returning partial dataset on shared failure.
 Return less accurate search results on node
failure.

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Yield
• You can trade yield for harvest.

Examples
 Database transactional locks.
 Return error on network failure instead.

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Yield
• The probability of computing a request.
• Total responses/Total requests=Yield, result of 0
to 1.

Examples
 Total responses=999
 Total requests=1000
 Yield=0.999
 Yield is NOT uptime.

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Yield
• You can trade harvest for Yield-Probabilistic
Availability.

Examples
 Returning stale (old) data.
 Prioritize the most critical data.

• A response to CAP Theory being widely

misunderstood and misused.
• How much of harvest/yield to sacrifice in the
event of a network partition.
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Partitioning & Replication
Strategies: Partitioning and replication are two
different strategies on scaling a distributed system.
Partitioning: dividing data to improve yield during
high loads. Data can be divided using deterministic
indexing strategies. Partitioning does not improve
system resilience towards network partitions or
node failures.
Example:
 By Geography (Asia, Europe, North America).
 By Hash (3xf8ca8e, etc.)
 By category (Hot/cold data)
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Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Partitioning

Superior University, Gold Campus

Replication
Replication: Creating redundancy of data to
improve Harvest in the event of node failures.
Replication used in conjunction with partitioning to
improve data redundancy. However, as we replicate
data, we improve read yield at the cost of write
yield, if we care about strong consistency.

Both strategies are used together in some

combinations.

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Replication

Superior University, Gold Campus

Replication

Superior University, Gold Campus

Replication

Superior University, Gold Campus

Replication

Superior University, Gold Campus

Replication

Superior University, Gold Campus

Replication

Superior University, Gold Campus