Ask HN: Is it worth getting into distributed systems after 12 years full stack?

Do you mean service oriented architectures? That's the practical 'distributed' systems many companies are using today. You don't need a degree- just go work at Amazon for a couple years.

Do you mean decentralized systems and algorithms? Paxos, Raft, Bitcoin and TOR? Then sure, you might consider a master's degree. Or just start reading papers online and messing around with code in your spare time.

For example, a system using a database with asynchronous replicas - especially if latency is not extremely low - using those replicas for read scaling, is an eventually consistent system (because of replication lag) and suffers from related issues.

Multi-master databases are even worse. You get the joys of network partitioning (netsplit or split-brain) and conflicting updates.

Sure, there are ways to work around this, but all the workarounds I know of have some rather ugly tradeoffs.

Basically, there are many opportunities to do something great, and not be bored. IMHO.

One growth area is cloud gaming. And I think "virtual desktops" in general may finally gain some consumer traction and scale pretty soon.

Naturally this leads to an interest in Decentralized Applications as it represents an opportunity to re-build the Web.

Some resources to get started. Best of luck ;)

MIT 6.S974, Decentralized Applications, Fall 2018

http://nil.lcs.mit.edu/6.S974/papers.html

Web 3.0 Summit Playlist

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxVihxZC42nHlc7J-UqeS...

I was under the impression that full stack meant you can do what's needed to stand up a solution at literally every OSI layer.

For example, from down at the base of infrastructure, networking, hardware/cloud, servers / platforms, integration, data / database, custom and COTs applications and services to clients, UI, desktop/web/thin/fat etc. etc.

By that measurement someone who can do all that probably already understands and in a sense, works in distributed systems - you probably had to already to cover the breadth and depth of all that knowledge.

Not picking on your choice of words here ("full stack"), just mulling it over and thinking: 1) if you can do that you're qualified to work on distributed systems and 2) there's no shortage of work advancing distributed systems and that problem isn't going away any time soon.

I'd say distributed systems is challenging (I worked on a startup doing that with database federation and it was really interesting and challenging), fun and important.

I think maybe the bigger question is, are you interested and want to dedicate the effort needed to get into it, and will that make you happy? There's so many levels of working in distributed systems - from research, inventing / building the tech, to implementing existing solutions (e.g. Apache Spark, Kubernetes etc. etc.).

If that stuff is interesting I'd first decide if I wanted to be on more on the research or practical side, and then how much money you need to live, and then choose my entry point into the field.