Building--and scaling--a reliable distributed architecture

I recently asked Joseph Breuer and Robert Reta, both Senior Software Engineers at Netflix, to discuss what they have learned through implementing a service at scale at Netflix. Joseph and Robert will be presenting a session on Event Sourcing at Global Scale at Netflix at O'Reilly Velocity Conference, taking place October 1-4 in New York. Here are some highlights from our conversation. The primary challenge when operating a service in a distributed architecture at scale is managing for the behavior of your downstream dependencies. Whether those dependencies are a datastore or a restful API defining timeouts, fallback data, and concurrency of the interactions will be the defining factor of your service.