CST438 Week 6

CST438 Week 6

This week's reading covered computing infrastructure and how large scale systems manage servers, containers, and workloads.

The concept that clicked most for me was idempotency, the idea that issuing a request twice produces the same result as issuing it once. It sounds simple but it has real implications for building reliable distributed systems, especially when retries are involved.

The section on containers versus VMs also connected directly to work I have already done. Deploying my project on AWS using ECS and Docker made the tradeoffs feel concrete rather than theoretical. Containers win on startup time and footprint, but they are not the right tool for everything, particularly around managing state.

The serverless model was interesting too. The engineer just provides the code and the platform handles the rest. It removes a lot of overhead but also takes away control, which is a real tradeoff depending on what you are building.

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