If you are into distributed systems, please spend some time

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Apr 24, 2025 • 1 min read


If you are into distributed systems, please spend some time reading about Vector Clocks and Hybrid Logical Clocks.

They are extremely important to track causality and the ordering of events across multiple nodes and even processes. They play an integral role in achieving consistency and conflict resolution.

Most of the distributed data stores use some flavour of Vector Clocks or HLC.

Here’s what I’d recommend - pick your favourite distributed database - DynamoDB, Cockroach, Riak, Cassandra (early versions, now they moved away), any, and see how they resolve conflicts. Go through their documentation or source to understand how they use it.

Once you spend some time and build a quick prototype, you will realize it just sounds fancy; in reality, it is not that difficult to understand; all it takes is some dedicated effort.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses