Building a modern durable execution engine from first principles

We dive into the architecture details of Restate, a Durable Execution engine we built from the ground up. Restate requires no database/log or other system, but implements a full stack that competes with the best logs in terms of durability and operations. This is the second article in our series on building a durable execution system from first principles. The first blog post in this series, Every System is a Log, looks at this from the application side, and shows how a unified log architecture results in a tremendous simplification of distributed coordination logic. This post discusses the details of how we built the log-based runtime for that paradigm. Modelling locking and database updates through an application log, taken from Every System is a Log To build this runtime, we asked ourselves, what such a system would look like when designed from first principles? We built a precursor to this with Stateful Functions, and from all the lessons learned there, we arrived at a design w ... Read full article.