Glossary

A

associativity
FIXME
async context variables
FIXME
at-least-once delivery
Message delivery guarantee ensuring every message is delivered one or more times. Requires acknowledgments and message redelivery on failure but may result in duplicates.
at-most-once delivery
Message delivery guarantee ensuring messages are delivered zero or one time, never duplicated but possibly lost. This is simple to implement but provides the weakest guarantee.

B

backoff multiplier
FIXME
backpressure
Mechanism to prevent overwhelming a system by signaling upstream components to slow down when downstream components cannot keep up.
buffer
FIXME

C

cache miss
FIXME
commutativity
FIXME
conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT)
FIXME
consumer group/span>
A set of message queue subscribers that share the workload. Messages are distributed among group members rather than duplicated to each.
contention/span>
FIXME
context propagation
Passing trace IDs, span IDs, and other metadata between services so that operations can be correlated in distributed tracing.

D

dataclass
FIXME
decorator
FIXME
decoupling
FIXME
delta
FIXME
double-ended queue (deque)
FIXME
divide and conquer
FIXME

E

exactly-once delivery
Message delivery guarantee ensuring each message is processed exactly once. This is difficult to achieve in practice.
exponential backoff
FIXME

F

fan-out
Pattern where one message or request triggers multiple downstream operations, such as publishing to multiple subscribers or calling multiple services in parallel.
future
FIXME

G

granulaty
FIXME
grow-only counter
FIXME

H

HTTP header
FIXME
HTTP status code
FIXME

I

idempotent
FIXME

J

JSON
FIXME

L

last-write-wins register
FIXME
livelock
FIXME
load balancing
FIXME

M

message broker
FIXME
microservice
FIXME

N

negative feedback loop
FIXME
network partition
FIXME

O

operation-based CRDT
FIXME

P

partition tolerance
FIXME
positive-negative counter
FIXME
priority queue
FIXME
publish-subscribe
Messaging pattern where publishers send messages to topics and subscribers receive all messages from topics they're interested in. This pattern decouples senders from receivers.

R

root span
FIXME
round-robin polling
FIXME

S

sampling
Recording only a fraction of traces in distributed tracing to reduce overhead and storage requirements.
schema
FIXME
singleton
FIXME
span
FIXME
state-based CRDT
FIXME
strong eventual consistency
FIXME

T

thread-local storage
FIXME
trace
The complete journey of a request through a distributed system, identified by a unique trace ID and composed of multiple spans forming a tree.
trace collector
FIXME

W

work stealing
A scheduling strategy where each worker maintains a local task queue and idle workers take tasks from others' queues in order to minimize contention while balancing load.