Future Trends of CRDTs

As we have seen throughout this course, Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are an integral pillar for building distributed applications and systems. With the constant rise of distributed computing, especially in fields such as e-commerce, online gaming, decentralized finance, and real-time collaborative applications, there's little doubt that CRDTs are poised for a decisive role in the future of distributed systems landscape.

With their ability to resolve conflicts without the requirement of synchronization or consensus, CRDTs have intrigued researchers and industry professionals alike. Ongoing research is exploring potential applications and extensions of CRDTs with contemporary concerns like privacy protections or integrations with machine learning systems.

Small advances, considered in terms of the vast journey mankind made from the invention of wheel to the premiere of Fast and Furious 9, are being made every day to make CRDTs more efficient and expand their application spectrum. For instance, future versions of your favorite ride-sharing app could possibly leverage CRDTs to manage the availability and location of cars in real-time, all around the globe.

Let's see a glimpse of that with a simple Python script that simulates car availability in four different locations. This is how tech might deal with distributed data in future systems of such apps.

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if __name__ == '__main__':

  from random import randint

​

  # simulating car availability in four different locations

  locations = ['New York', 'Paris', 'Dubai', 'Sydney']

  car_availability = {}

​

  for location in locations:

    car_availability[location] = randint(1, 100)

​

  print('Car availability in different locations:')

  for location, availability in car_availability.items():

    print(location + ':', availability)