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Architecture · 6 nodes

Distributed basics

What the network does to assumptions you did not know you had made, until it breaks them. Retries, ordering, and the honest version of exactly-once.

Is this path right for me?

ASSUMES

The Architecture path, or equivalent scar tissue.

GIVES YOU

A way to reason about failure that does not depend on the failure being polite.

LEADS TO

Nowhere yet. This is the newest path, and only two of its six nodes are written so far.

Nothing is tracked and nothing is locked — the map exists so you can see where an article sits.

Suggested start Written Not written yet Optional or subtopic

  1. NODE 01 · REQUIRED Not written yet

    What the network can do to you

    • Partitions
    • Timeout is not failure

  2. NODE 02 · REQUIRED Suggested start

    Retries and idempotency

    See why retries hit hardest exactly when a system is already failing, why spacing them out is not enough on its own, and where the multiplication comes from.

    • Backoff and jitter
    • Dedupe windows

  3. NODE 03 · REQUIRED Not written yet

    Ordering

    • Per-key order
    • Causality

  4. NODE 04 · REQUIRED Not written yet

    Exactly-once, honestly

    • Effectively-once
    • The outbox pattern

  5. NODE 05 · OPTIONAL Not written yet

    Consensus, from a distance

    • Quorums
    • Leases

  6. NODE 06 · REQUIRED Written

    Observability when it breaks

    See what one header has to carry for a request to stay one story across a dozen services, and why the identifiers are standardised but the meaning is not.

    • Trace context
    • Correlation ids