This is a really interesting engineering challenge: how do you count when the people doing the counting are scattered around the world? For Netflix, it's a practical problem: each time someone views a Netflix video, Netflix wants to increment the 'views' counter by one. But how do you do that without the many flaws that might make the actual count inaccurate? This article describes their recently published "deep dive into their Distributed Counter Abstraction." Idempotency - the idea that the same REST request should return the same result - plays a key role. It allows remote sites to retry failed requests, for example, without double counting. This may seem to some like a pretty trivial problem, but as we enter the era of distributed computing, answering questions like this will be crucial.
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