In a distributed environment - similar to actors scattered across Paris, Tokyo, and Los Angeles - changes are happening irregularly. Some are adding new elements, while others are deleting. However, what remains unchanged is our goal to ensure that all changes will reflect at all nodes - much like all actors knowing the complete and updated script independently.
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) come into play as they inherently facilitate achieving this consistency. CRDTs have a unique property which means they can be independently updated by different nodes, and these updates can then be replicated across other nodes to achieve a consistent state, similar to our globally dispersed actors sharing updates to the movie script.
Think of CRDT as an actor working on her script. She receives an update (a change in her dialogue), applies it, and then shares this update with the rest of the acting team. Similarly, a CRDT receives an operation (add/delete), applies it, and then transmits this operation to all other replicas. The beauty is, no matter the order in which these updates arrive at different nodes, the end state will be eventually consistent.
The Python code provided illustrates the concept of CRDTs by simulating a Set data type. Each operation symbolizes an update done at different nodes, and in the end, all nodes have the same understanding of the set.
xxxxxxxxxxif __name__ == '__main__': # Python representation of a CRDT set crdt_set = set() # Simulating updates at different nodes crdt_set.add('Paris') # Update at Node 1 crdt_set.add('Tokyo') # Update at Node 2 crdt_set.remove('Paris') # Update at Node 3 print(crdt_set)