I head to Austin Texas today to attend Udi Dahan’s 5-day course titled “Advanced Distributed System Design”. Assuming I have any brain power left, I intend to blog my impressions at the end of each day. I though it might be fun to start off the series with a brief post about my expectations.
This course is doubly interesting to me because I also start a new job on Monday at a growing e-commerce company. I got involved with them as a consultant helping them vet aspects of their new application design. It was largely based on SharpArchitecture and followed a fairly typical layered approach. I strongly advocated a more distributed approach perhaps even going as far as using CQRS. In the end, the team decided to adopt some distributed concepts in the higher-traffic, customer-facing application. The administrative application will continue to rely on SQL Server and transactions to guarantee data consistency.
Unfortunately, it is becoming clear that the administrative application will not be able to use transactions across the board as the team hoped. It has to handle things, like media, that don’t fit well in SQL Server and probably won’t be able to participate in transactions. This is forcing the team to wrestle with some of the concepts I felt justified a distributed approach for the administrative application too.
So now I am off to see the wizard along with some of my new collegues. Everything I’ve read and heard tells me that I am in for a mind-blowing experience. Although I have been working with distributed systems for a very long time, I fully expect to feel overwhelmed and probably pretty stupid at times. My main goal is to exit the class with a broader perspective on distributed system design. My secondary goal is to learn how to better explain the benefits and costs of building a distributed system to others.
I also expect to see some benefits from a team perspective. I can just imagine the dinner conversations with the team as we wrestle with the implications of what we learned during the day. My hope is that the team will leave with confidence about where and how to apply distributed system concepts to solve some of the problems that we currently face. Construction kicks off March 1 so there is still some time to adjust course if we feel it is necessary.
Go on to part 2.
Tom Cabanski 