Exam 1 Review

Here is a list of topics I suggest you review in preparation for your midterm exam:

1. Why study distributed systems?
2. Client/server architecture
3. N-tier web architecture
4. SOA
5. Twitter - original architecture and scalability challenges
6. Web services
   1. Why
   2. SOAP/REST
7. Non-web distributed systems
8. CAP
9. Pinterest
   1. scaling challenges
   2. clustering vs sharding
10. Causality
11. Time synchronization
    1. drift and skew
    2. Cristian's algorithm
    3. NTP (high level)
12. Synchronous vs asynchronous systems
13. Lamport timestamps
14. Vector timestamps
15. Coordination algorithms
    1. safety
    2. liveness
    3. mutual exclusion
    4. election
16. Paxos
    1. protocol
17. Replication
    1. consistency models
    2. Pileus
       1. implementation
       2. evaluation