I'm surprised there is no mention of the Bitcoin white paper. One of the most practical consensus protocols out there. Sure there is a lot of emphasis on the currency itself but I found the consensus protocol explanation so simple and easy to understand, as opposed to the Paxos algorithm.
Distributed Systems Reading List
11–20 of 77 posts
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#12It's missing the bible. Andrew Tanenbaum's Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms.
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#13Great list. Only thing I’d add for the other enterprise developers out there is to first default to not building a distributed system at all, but rather build a much smaller monolith. In 25 years I’ve worked for so many orgs that wanted to build The World’s Most Scalable System for what would maybe be a few hundred concurrent users. Not surprisingly, those projects tend to tank.
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#14Most of the links in comments are useful. But after a point it's hard to find small projects to implement to practice these. I had to do 2PC for a class.
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#15Great list. Only thing I’d add for the other enterprise developers out there is to first default to not building a distributed system at all, but rather build a much smaller monolith. In 25 years I’ve worked for so many orgs that wanted to build The World’s Most Scalable System for what would maybe be a few hundred concurrent users. Not surprisingly, those projects tend to tank.
That's great advice, as long as different systems in this monolith are loosely coupled both in terms of code and data, and you keep in mind that you will need to move them to separate services later on.
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#16Great list. Only thing I’d add for the other enterprise developers out there is to first default to not building a distributed system at all, but rather build a much smaller monolith. In 25 years I’ve worked for so many orgs that wanted to build The World’s Most Scalable System for what would maybe be a few hundred concurrent users. Not surprisingly, those projects tend to tank.
That is a great advice. However if scalability must be introduced later on, it can be really hard as there are many features that have been added to the monolith, and refactoring it to become scalable can be a huge task.
The conditions where the monolith must be converted to a scalable system should be defined as early as possible.
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#17good list but for me the reference is now Martin Kleppmanns new lecture: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_H...
Is the first part of the course (Concurrency part) available online too ?
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#18Great list. Only thing I’d add for the other enterprise developers out there is to first default to not building a distributed system at all, but rather build a much smaller monolith. In 25 years I’ve worked for so many orgs that wanted to build The World’s Most Scalable System for what would maybe be a few hundred concurrent users. Not surprisingly, those projects tend to tank.
The problem with scaling is that visitor count often goes exponentially. So while in the beginning everything seems calm and quiet, suddenly you can see a massive spike in interest. And if you didn't take the right measures, you might lose all that interest.
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#19Great list. Only thing I’d add for the other enterprise developers out there is to first default to not building a distributed system at all, but rather build a much smaller monolith. In 25 years I’ve worked for so many orgs that wanted to build The World’s Most Scalable System for what would maybe be a few hundred concurrent users. Not surprisingly, those projects tend to tank.
Hear hear.
This is really important wisdom being shared.
And with a single monolith you can comfortably handle several thousand concurrent users, not just several hundred.
From my humble experience I've found that it is also relatively easier to migrate an established monolith to a semi-distributed system, than it is to build and scale a distributed system from the ground up whilst at the same time trying to figure out all its kinks before it too becomes an established system.
Re: Distributed Systems Reading List
#20Great list. Only thing I’d add for the other enterprise developers out there is to first default to not building a distributed system at all, but rather build a much smaller monolith. In 25 years I’ve worked for so many orgs that wanted to build The World’s Most Scalable System for what would maybe be a few hundred concurrent users. Not surprisingly, those projects tend to tank.
Hear hear. This is really important wisdom being shared. And with a single monolith you can comfortably handle several thousand concurrent users, not just several hundred. From my humble experience I've found that it is also relatively easier to migrate an established monolith to a semi-distributed system, than it is to build and scale a distributed system from the ground up whilst at the same time trying to figure o…
> And with a single monolith you can comfortably handle several thousand concurrent users, not just several hundred.
That depends on what kind of service you offer, of course.