Beyond Academic Proof: Scaling Provable Correctness in Production

Standard distributed-systems recovery protocols can spread disk corruption and cause cluster-wide data loss unless storage and consensus layers are co-designed.

• Redundancy ≠ fault tolerance: Alagappan and Ganesan's PhD study injected single-block disk corruptions into distributed stores and found Cassandra's read-repair protocol spread corruption instead of healing it.
• Crash vs. corruption confusion: Systems like ZooKeeper and EXT4's journaling code can't distinguish a mid-log corruption from a crash, leading them to truncate logs and, if that node becomes leader, erase correct data cluster-wide; TigerBeetle is cited as better co-designing these layers.

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