Towards Time Travel in Distributed Event-sourced Systems

Abstract

Stateful applications are based on the state they hold and how it changes over time. This history of state changes is usually discarded as the application progresses. By building on concepts from event processing and storing the application history we envision a novel programming paradigm that supports retroaction. Retroactive computing introduces new opportunities for a developer to access and even modify an application timeline. By enabling the exploration of alternative scenarios, retroactive computing establishes powerful new ways to debug systems and introduces new approaches to solve problems. Initial work has shown the practicality and possibilities of this new programming paradigm and introduces further research questions and challenges.