Fast Eventual Consistency: Inside Corrosion, the Distributed System Powering Fly.io

QCon London 2025

Session

Fast Eventual Consistency: Inside Corrosion, the Distributed System Powering Fly.io

Monday Apr 7 / 03:55PM BST, Whittle (3rd Fl.)

Abstract

This talk explores Corrosion, an open-source solution built on SQLite that delivers fast, eventually consistent replication across distributed nodes. Initially developed at Fly to replace Consul for service discovery, Corrosion has evolved to power the platform, enabling the rapid dissemination of machine and service data across numerous nodes with a p99 latency of one second. Leveraging technologies such as Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) for conflict resolution, the SWIM gossip protocol for membership management, and the QUIC transport protocol, Corrosion is implemented in Rust and is open-source. In this talk, we will explore these technologies, dive into architectural and design decisions, and discuss how Corrosion is used in production at Fly. Whether you're familiar with these concepts or they're new to you, join us for an in-depth look at Corrosion.

76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon London 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

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