State-Oriented Consistency: Why We Stopped Looking for One Right Answer
Summary
This blog post argues for state-oriented consistency in distributed systems, using a clustered MQTT broker as a case study. It narrates an outage caused by loading all client sessions on every node and presents a framework to map each piece of state to its minimum necessary guarantee and the corresponding mechanism. The result is a simpler, memory-efficient architecture where ownership and guarantees are determined per state, not universally applied.