
Onyx Straps in For a Jepsening - lbradstreet
http://www.onyxplatform.org/jekyll/update/2016/03/15/Onyx-Straps-In-For-A-Jepsening.html
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oconnore
I just spent ~5 minutes clicking through on the Onyx site (learn, docs, blog,
support, learn/FAQ, github) and still have no idea what it does.

It's a "a masterless, cloud scale, fault tolerant, high performance
distributed computation system"! So it's EC2?

~~~
oinksoft
EC2 is a proprietary service for creating virtual machines on demand in
Amazon's infrastructure, it is not a computation system. Much as a relational
database system provides a framework for storing and retrieving relational
data, a computation system provides a framework for performing (usually large-
scale) computations, like transforming text files. It is open-ended, just as
an RDBMS imposes no schema. A simple example would the processing pipeline of
some web crawler.

Hadoop is one of the better known computation systems, though it does other
things too (e.g. persistence with HDFS). Apache Storm is another popular
computation system, particularly in the Clojure world. Onyx was created a few
years ago, is implemented in Clojure, and competes with Storm (it's the first
such system mentioned in the "What is it?" section of
[https://github.com/onyx-platform/onyx](https://github.com/onyx-
platform/onyx)).

Onyx is distributed (meaning there are multiple nodes cooperating, typically
over a network), and Jepsen is a rigorous tool for testing fault-tolerance in
such systems. Being masterless (no node has central authority) is valuable for
fault-tolerance. It means that in the event of a network partition, either
side of the partition can continue processing as normal and recover when the
partition is resolved. Jepsen simulates these and other fault conditions.

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lbradstreet
It was a lot of fun testing Onyx using Jepsen, though it did take some time to
get things right. If anyone has questions about testing a distributed system
in this way I'd be happy to answer them.

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bitwize
Was bracing for something about Mary Lou Jepsen. No dice. What a drag.

