Top all-time · #5113
Mahesh Balakrishnan
Personal blog · maheshba.bitbucket.io/blogsystemsprogramming
Mahesh Balakrishnan writes mahesh’s blog, a personal blog at maheshba.bitbucket.io about systems and programming. Since 2021, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “Things I learned from building a production database”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mahesh Balakrishnan's blog for distributed systems design posts, such as a comparison of Raft and MultiPaxos modularity and a discussion of the trade-offs in distributed consistency.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Things I learned from building a production database3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-02
- What we talk about when we talk about System Design3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-13
- The leadership myth in replicated databases (2023)2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-05-07
- Is Raft more modular than MultiPaxos?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-12-18
- Paxos Made Abstract2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-15
- The Art of Managing Skunks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-10
- Jeeps, Ferraris, and Other Engineers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-30
- Your Agent is a Distributed System (and fails like one)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-04-24
What Hacker News says?
Agree, Raft is less modular and therefore harder to understand than MultiPaxos: https://maheshba.bitbucket.io/blog/2021/12/14/Modularity.htm...
Comment linking /blog/2021/12/14/Modularity.html
on “Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus (2014)”Submitted Things I learned from building a production database as a story · 551 points
HN discussionI don’t agree with much in this writing other than that eventual consistency is a bad choice. Distributed systems are hard but in 2024 there are enough known patterns and techniques to make them less icky. Systems built on total ordering are much more tractable than weaker protocols. Mahesh Balakrishnan’s recent paper[0] on the Shared Log abstraction is a great recipe, for example. As an aside, I’ve never enjoyed th…
Comment linking /papers/osr2024.pdf
on “Pick Your Distributed Poison”Submitted Three Laws of Software Complexity as a story · 268 points
HN discussionI believe TigerBeetle are alluding to their integration of protocol-aware recovery [1], which is a worthy consideration for the log implementation. Yet another engineering concern which can be offloaded. If the disaggregated log integrates some mechanism to support leadership "above" it [2], it can be functionally identical to a converged log. Efficiency-wise yes there will be some extra network messages – but netwo…
Comment linking /blog/2023/05/06/Leadership.html
on “The disaggregated write-ahead log (2023)”Submitted The leadership myth in replicated databases (2023) as a story · 60 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Art of Managing Skunks as a story · 56 points
HN discussionSubmitted Is Raft more modular than MultiPaxos? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted 42 Things I learned from building a production database as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Jeeps, Ferraris, and Other Engineers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Art of Managing Skunks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What we talk about when we talk about System Design as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Paxos Made Abstract as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Things I learned from building a production database as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Your Agent is a Distributed System (and fails like one) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Agent is a distributed system (and fails like one) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Jeeps, Ferraris, and Other Engineers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Leadership Myth in Replicated Databases as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What we talk about when we talk about System Design as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What we talk about when we talk about System Design as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Leadership Myth in Replicated Databases as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Paxos Made Abstract as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
