Distributed Systems

Short write-ups, intuitions mostly from studying/teaching the distributed systems course (CS 425) at UIUC.

• On Liveness

  Clarifying misconceptions about liveness in distributed systems.

• Chandy-Lamport Snapshots

  Why is the Chandy Lamport Snapshot algorithm the way it is?

• Flavours of Consensus: Sync, Async and Byzantine

  Consensus in synchronous, asynchronous and Byzantine settings.

• Power of the RPC Abstraction

  Why RPCs matter? Appreaciating the abstraction of RPCs.

• Design Thumbrules

  self noites while designing distributed systems

• AWS Outage of October 2025

  Thoughts on recent AWS outage.