Distributed KV-Store

This was a project from the University of Washington's CSE 452, Distributed Systems course. Scott and I built a linerizable key/value database storage system in Java that "shards" (partitions) the keys over a set of replica groups and handles cross-group transactions, similar to DynamoDB. Unfortunately, we are not able to share the code publicly, but I will go over some of the key difficulties encountered while doing this project.

Why it was so difficult

Distributed systems are notoriously difficult because:

• They are hard to plan ahead for
• They are hard to get correct
• They are hard to debug

Any newcoming programmer like Scott and I were to this field will be hit hard with the relentless wrath that is distributed systems.

How long did we spend

We spent upwards of 30+ hours each doing these labs. The majority of the time taken to complete these was not the coding itself, but writing up the design document, and debugging.

Key takeaways

Do not procrastinate. Start early. Think carefully before implementation.