DAY 130 / 210

Safety Properties in Distributed Systems

This opening day of phase-4 establishes the distinction between safety and liveness properties that underpins all later work on consensus, replication, and fault tolerance. It matters because AI engineering systems at startup scale, such as StartupTribunal, must guarantee invariants even under partial failure before any performance or availability work begins.

⏱ 50 min target📝 2 quiz Qs

Resources

readingraft.github.io
Raft: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm
Sections 1-3
40 min

Deliverable

Journal entry defining one safety property and mapping it to the rate-limiter implementation

Quiz · 2 questions

1. Which statement correctly distinguishes a safety property from a liveness property?

Safety guarantees something bad never happens; liveness guarantees something good eventually happensSafety is about throughput; liveness is about latencySafety only applies to single-node systems; liveness applies to clustersSafety properties can be violated temporarily; liveness properties cannot

2. Give one concrete example of a safety violation that could occur in a distributed rate limiter.

Journal

Time spent (minutes)

Blockers

Commit / PR links (one per line)