Little Things and Big Things - Lessons for Building Large Systems

Explore essential lessons for designing and building large-scale systems in this keynote talk from the 2023 Code BEAM Lite Stockholm event. Delve into hard-earned insights from Peter van Roy, covering both small and significant aspects of system design that can maintain functionality and preserve sanity when tackling big projects. Examine real-world examples illustrating crucial topics such as system obedience rules, the pitfalls of large buffers, handling system instability, avoiding nondeterminism in distributed systems, understanding correlations, proper timeout usage, mitigation versus propagation strategies, and the significance of multiple timescales. Gain valuable knowledge from an ongoing project collaboration with PNSol, aimed at developing comprehensive tutorials and tools for large-scale system design. Learn how to apply these principles to keep your systems working efficiently and effectively at scale.