Winner takes the cake Imagine yourself sitting in your room furiously working away at your homework for the day, as the voice of your mother echoes in your head: “I want you and your brother to go to each of your rooms. Whichever one of you finishes both of your…

We’re back! It’s been a bit longer since my last update to this series, so I’d again highly suggest visiting parts 1 and 2 before going through this post, it’ll make it a lot more worthwhile! After setting up our virtual networks and VMs, with one router VM having…

Welcome back! If you followed part 1 of this series, then we’ll be answering a lot of the questions you may have had from last time, and if not, I’d highly suggest reading part 1 before we continue our journey to building a router. To recap, we’ve set up our…

In my last post, I gave a brief taste of what exactly modern cryptography entails, starting first with some historical cryptography, and how it contrasts with what we could consider useful cryptography, in the age of high-performance, distributed and networked computing. I left you with a few questions: Is the…

Data encryption is one of the core tenants of modern computing, and is the key to allowing for the technologies of our digital age to safely connect people and services to one another, so it is no surprise that there is a beautiful science behind it. Encryption is underpinned by…

The ubiquitous Paxos algorithm is one of the earliest and most widely cited consensus algorithms for designing a replicated state machine, and will be our follow up to two-phase commit and ongoing efforts to build this type of system. I’ll be building off our previous discussion of two-phase commit, understanding…

I feel like I drone on way too long usually when discussing papers and algorithms, and based on my not so stellar viewership metrics, I thought i’d cut to the chase with this one. I talked some time back about consensus algorithms very briefly, but not the core problem we…

Note: I want to start writing more often, and I think that part of doing that will simply be word vomiting whatever i’m doing onto this blog from time to time, instead of trying to write more comprehensive (and as a result, longer) posts. …

The Google file system (GFS) is a proprietary distributed file system, which was created as a solution to serve the highly concurrent streaming data applications managed by Google. …