flowblok's comments

(article author here)

> That third subset means the third frontend only has a subset of three backends, even though you want it to have four.

This explanation is correct, thanks. Alas, word limits demand brevity.

> implicit assumption about the requirement that the final algorithm require no dynamic/runtime coordination

An earlier iteration of this article included coordination as one of the properties, but this unfortunately had to be cut. AFAICS, the only other two kinds of coordination are “frontend tasks talk to each other” or “frontend tasks ask a subsetting service for their subset”. Within Google, both of these options are unacceptable: we either introduce the risk that a rogue frontend task brings down all the frontends, or introduce new unappealing failure modes (what do you do if the subsetting service is unavailable?). There is potential for other subsetting algorithms in this space, and while I’d be excited to see them, I’m mildly sceptical about their practicality at scale.

> For instance, in table 3, it looks like they excluded backend tasks {0,1} (for frontend tasks {0, 1}) then {2,3} (for frontend tasks {2,3}) in the N=10 case, but backend tasks {1,2} then {3,4} in the N=11. Why the discrepancy?

With N = 10, there will be N mod k = 10 mod 4 = 2 leftover tasks, and so the round-robin fashion excludes {0, 1} then {2, 3}. However for N = 11, there will be N mod k = 11 mod 4 = 3 leftover tasks, so the round-robin fashion excludes {0, 1, 2} then {3, 4, 5}.

But as joatmon-snoo correctly said, the more important point is demonstrating how bad backend churn is with this algorithm.

and for the "recreate all symlinks" step, you can use your vcs to determine which symlinks need to be changed.