On Distributed Failures - Blake Mizerany

In unreliable networks, with unreliable processors (also known as “The Cloud”) one must know all the ways their thing can fail; and just as importantly, how to recover. It is even better to have the ability to recover in an automated way. I’ll go over the common failure conditions in distributed systems, and then introduce you to Doozer, the highly-available, consistant data store that makes recovering from these problems easy.