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"Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation" by Will Wilson

Strange Loop Conference · 55.6K views · 2014-09-20 · 40:20

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Overview

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

On Hacker News

HN treats it as the canonical talk on simulation testing and a mind-blowing example of how far rigorous testing can go.

Recommended by 12 HN people across 11 months · HN mentions 2014–2024

Topics

Distributed systemsTesting, debugging & developer toolsDatabases & storage
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deterministic simulationfoundationdbfault injectionconcurrency bugsstrange loop

What people said

LAC-Tech · 2023-09 · Strong recommendation

"FDB can tolerate f failures with only f+1 replicas." Wait a minute, I know that formula... Viewstamped Replication?? I need to read the foundation DB paper. (I mainly read CRDT stuff so hopefully it's understandable). --- In general I'm really impressed foundation DB folks. The talk "Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation" by Will Wilson blew my mind. TL;DR they spent the majority of their initial dev effort into making a simulation of the database, then when they were happy with that plugged in real storage, time and networks at the end. Well worth a watch for anyone interested in distributed systems & reliability. [VIDEO]

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sgk284 · 2021-06 · Strong recommendation

Here's another excellent talk at Strangeloop on FoundationDB's simulation testing by Will Wilson in 2014: [VIDEO]

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rubyn00bie · 2018-11 · Strong recommendation

Soooo stoked. This should make futzing with it to get started a lot easier. I've been thinking about going to the FoundationDB summit to hopefully learn more... Does anyone have any good resources for learning about it? I've tried a few times but find the documentation a bit hard to grok. Maybe I'm just slow. Also if you haven't seen it, this is one of the most amazing talks on distributed systems (because it's about testing them) I've ever seen (by Will Wilson from FoundationDB pre-Apple merger): [VIDEO] Truly mind blowing how good FoundationDB is supposed to be for its use cases, and this Mongo layer is just the business when it comes to helping adoption.

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Sources

Video by Strange Loop Conference, played through YouTube.

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