
Birth of the NearCloud: Serverless and CRDTs  Edge Is the New Next Thing - jaksprats
http://highscalability.com/blog/2017/11/6/birth-of-the-nearcloud-serverless-crdts-edge-is-the-new-next.html
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pitthu
Very informative! Made a nice Monday read. I specially liked the analogy with
the Amazon Fulfillment centers. Pretty amazing to see that there is so much
untapped potential for latency improvement and Kuhiro taking the steps in just
the right direction. Would love to read more about CRDTs and the internals of
this platform. Good luck!

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rajnathani
They mention Google Cloud Spanner as being slow due to locking during the two-
phase commit. However would distributed transactions be possible without
locks?

If I’m not mistaken, CRDTs cannot provide distributed transactions.

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jaksprats
Two phase commit (in spanner) is similar to a lock, so the short answer is YES
you need locks for distributed TRANSACTIONS

But you dont need transactions to do distributed computation. This is where
CRDTs come in, they allow you to modify data locally w/ zero wait and the
replication of these modifications happens asynchronously (imagine a split
second later) and then there are algorithms that run on the receiver of the
replication that automatically and intuitively resolve any conflicts that
happened because the data was not (globally) locked

I will have a post next week on serverless.com explaining the internals of
CRDTs, it should help clear stuff like this up.

