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Re:Apple open-sources FoundationDB by wwilson on Thursday April 19, 2018 @09:32PM (#16881513)
The only thing that's different in a distributed cluster is the implementations of steps 1 and 6. As voidmain said, the details of that are not trivial, ESPECIALLY the details of how it never produces wrong answers during fault conditions.

I don't know that there's been an exhaustive writeup of that part, but maybe one of us or somebody on the Apple team will put something together. It probably won't fit in an HN comment though!

Or... maybe this is the part where I point out that the product is now open-source, and invite you to read the (mostly very well commented) code. :-)

Re:Apple open-sources FoundationDB by veesahni on Thursday April 19, 2018 @11:11PM (#16881907)
The documentation ( https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/technical-overview.html ) sells the product, but doesn't give a deep enough explanation. As a closed source product, that's understandable.

Going forward as an opensource product, I hope to see some clarity on the "how it works"... Distributed, performant ACID sounds good, almost too good to be true. Not that I doubt it at the moment, I just want to understand it better :)