Netflix’s Distributed Counter Abstraction

Netflix's Distributed Counter Abstraction is a high-performance, scalable counting service built on top of their TimeSeries Abstraction. It supports two primary counting modes—Best-Effort and Eventually Consistent—to cater to different use cases and trade-offs involving accuracy, latency, and infrastructure costs. The service aims to handle high throughput and availability by leveraging a combination of caching, durable queuing, and periodic aggregation mechanisms. Additionally, it incorporates various approaches to manage potential data loss, idempotency, and contention issues inherent in distributed systems.