But life can be made easier with tactics such as the actor pattern and the use of conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs). Caitie McCaffrey is a distributed systems engineer who currently works at Twitter. She previously worked on Halo 4 at Microsoft and 343 Industries. At QCon San Francisco, she will be hosting the track Taming Distributed Architecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices