Presentation: What Came First: The Ordering of Events in Systems

Your favorite distributed system and the concurrent program you wrote last week are built on the same foundational principle for ordering events across the system. This talk will explore the beautifully simple happens-before principle that lies behind these complex systems. We will delve into how happens-before is tracked in a distributed database like Riak, and how it’s implicitly maintained by the concurrency primitives provided in languages like Go. We will touch upon other sophisticated uses of happens-before like consensus protocols and data race detection.