Ordering the Chaos: Cleaning Logs and Ordering Events in Microservices

No more monoliths! Let's use microservices and asynchronous invocations everywhere! But how to track logs when multiple calls are in place, clocks are skewed, the network is faulty, and something goes wrong? How to figure out what happened first? And how to debug this single request which caused so much trouble?

In this talk Adam discusses problems with synchronizing clocks and why relying on timestamps doesn't work in the world of microservices. He will show happened-before relations, vector clocks, correlation ids, and other patterns used to introduce some meaningful order. You will understand why the common understanding of "time" is misleading in distributed systems and what to use to mitigate that.