Ryan Barrett - Transactions Across Datacenters

Transactions Across Datacenters - Ryan Barrett
For those who are attending Google I/O 2009(/), these video are an opportunity to hear from some of the speakers in advance. The speakers introduce their topic and provide a preview of one or more topics that will be covered in their talks.
If you work on distributed systems, you try to design your system to keep running if any single machine fails. If you're ambitious, you might extend this to entire racks, or even more inconvenient sets of machines. However, what if your entire datacenter falls off the face of the earth? This talk will examine how current large scale storage systems handle fault tolerance and consistency, with a particular focus on the App Engine datastore. We'll cover techniques such as replication, sharding, two phase commit, and consensus protocols (e.g. Paxos), then explore how they can be applied across datacenters.