Overview

Gossip protocols provide a probabilistic and resilient way to send updates, detect failures, and synchronize state across a fleet of nodes in a distributed system to drive eventual consistency.

Rumour Mongering

We will try to understand the core mechanics of how the rumour mongering gossip protocol works, how each node picks a small random fan‑out of peers and sends only new “rumours,” and merges incoming updates into its local state.

We will then try to build intuition for these protocols through interactive visualizations, and explanations that shows how rumors spread through nodes in real time.

Finally, we will look at a concise implementation of the rumor-mongering protocol written in Rust, and learn how we can extend it to build reliable gossip systems.

Takeaways

• Understanding Gossip Protocols and how real world systems drive eventual convergence.
• Learning by Doing: Implementing the rumor-mongering protocol through a step-by-step walkthrough helps build a solid mental model of gossip protocols.

Audience

This session is ideal for engineers who are building distributed systems and want a clear, intuitive grasp of gossip‑driven consistency—and a hands‑on recipe for building it in Rust.

Bio

Shriram Balaji works as a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft in Microsoft 365 Core building large scale distributed systems that deal with O(exabytes) of data and trillions of requests per day. He likes to tinker with systems, databases, compilers and things on the web.

Slide Deck

Rumour Has It - Slide Deck