Recent content in Posts on byatt.io
The modern control plane is a control system. One might think that goes without saying, but what’s critical here is that this claim has theoretical content. When I say “the control plane is a control system,” this is not a metaphor (at least, no more than any other sentence is a metaphor). I’m claiming that the language, theory, and results of a century of control systems…
For an interactive study of the phenomena discussed in this post, click here. Signals — both waveforms across an analog line and the kind we use for distributed software observability — have formally characterizable properties. In fact, they share a name because in many respects they have the same formally characterizable properties. If we model the software systems we design as continuous, we can…
Twenty-one papers on distributed scheduling for Q2 2026 — about half I’ve already worked through, the other half I’m catching up on this quarter. The list is sorted by structural family: how each paper approaches the scheduling problem, not when it appeared. This list will take you through the most important developments in the theory and practice of designing large-scale distributed…
§01 The Problem o11y E ventually, every piece of software we build and deploy in production generates some user experience that requires us to examine the state of our application as it's running in production. Maybe when we first launch some system, we can wrap it up in a VM or a container and fling it into the world, but eventually we find that we need more detailed information about our…
§01 Code as Text text I t's 9:30 AM on a Tuesday and I've just sat at my desk with a cup of coffee. I open up Slack, and ping goes the notification bubble in my taskbar. I have a DM asking for a PR review. I open the PR, and as I settle in and open my mind to the text as it scrolls lazily past me, I am teleported.
§01 The Rise of Raft consensus T he distributed systems world has witnessed a fascinating phenomenon: the rise of the Raft consensus algorithm. More than just gaining a foothold, Raft has become the de facto standard for new distributed applications that require consensus across stateful actions. From etcd, the backbone of Kubernetes, to Redpanda Data taking on the established Kafka, this simple…