Understanding Distributed Systems

Learning to build distributed systems is hard, especially if they are large scale. It's not that there is a lack of information out there. You can find academic papers, engineering blogs, and even books on the subject. The problem is that the available information is spread out all over the place, and if you were to put it on a spectrum from theory to practice, you would find a lot of material at the two ends but not much in the middle. That is why I decided to write a book that brings together the core theoretical and practical concepts of distributed systems so that you don't have to spend hours connecting the dots. This book will guide you through the fundamentals of large-scale distributed systems, with just enough details and external references to dive deeper. This is the guide I wished existed when I first started out, based on my experience building large distributed systems that scale to millions of requests per second and billions of devices. If you are a developer working on the backend of web or mobile applications (or would like to be!), this book is for you. When building distributed applications, you need to be familiar with the network stack, data consistency models, scalability and reliability patterns, observability best practices, and much more. Although you can build applications without knowing much of that, you will end up spending hours debugging and re-architecting them, learning hard lessons that you could have acquired in a much faster and less painful way. However, if you have several years of experience designing and building highly available and fault-tolerant applications that scale to millions of users, this book might not be for you. As an expert, you are likely looking for depth rather than breadth, and this book focuses more on the latter since it would be impossible to cover the field otherwise. The second edition is a complete rewrite of the previous edition. Every page of the first edition has been reviewed and where appropriate reworked, with new topics covered for the first time.

Learning to build distributed systems is hard, especially if they are large scale. It's not that there is a lack of information out there. You can find academic papers, engineering blogs, and even books on the subject. The problem is that the available information is spread out all over the place, and if you were to put it on a spectrum from theory to practice, you would find a lot of material at the two ends, but not much in the middle. That is why I decided to write a book to teach the fundamentals of distributed systems so that you don’t have to spend countless hours scratching your head to understand how everything fits together. This is the guide I wished existed when I first started out, and it's based on my experience building large distributed systems that scale to millions of requests per second and billions of devices. If you develop the back-end of web or mobile applications (or would like to!), this book is for you. When building distributed systems, you need to be familiar with the network stack, data consistency models, scalability and reliability patterns, and much more. Although you can build applications without knowing any of that, you will end up spending hours debugging and re-designing their architecture, learning lessons that you could have acquired in a much faster and less painful way.

Without established design patterns to guide them, developers have had to build distributed systems from scratch, and most of these systems are very unique indeed. Today, the increasing use of containers has paved the way for core distributed system patterns and reusable containerized components. This practical guide presents a collection of repeatable, generic patterns to help make the development of reliable distributed systems far more approachable and efficient. Author Brendan Burns—Director of Engineering at Microsoft Azure—demonstrates how you can adapt existing software design patterns for designing and building reliable distributed applications. Systems engineers and application developers will learn how these long-established patterns provide a common language and framework for dramatically increasing the quality of your system. Understand how patterns and reusable components enable the rapid development of reliable distributed systems Use the side-car, adapter, and ambassador patterns to split your application into a group of containers on a single machine Explore loosely coupled multi-node distributed patterns for replication, scaling, and communication between the components Learn distributed system patterns for large-scale batch data processing covering work-queues, event-based processing, and coordinated workflows

For this third edition of -Distributed Systems, - the material has been thoroughly revised and extended, integrating principles and paradigms into nine chapters: 1. Introduction 2. Architectures 3. Processes 4. Communication 5. Naming 6. Coordination 7. Replication 8. Fault tolerance 9. Security A separation has been made between basic material and more specific subjects. The latter have been organized into boxed sections, which may be skipped on first reading. To assist in understanding the more algorithmic parts, example programs in Python have been included. The examples in the book leave out many details for readability, but the complete code is available through the book's Website, hosted at www.distributed-systems.net. A personalized digital copy of the book is available for free, as well as a printed version through Amazon.com.

Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords? In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

In modern computing a program is usually distributed among several processes. The fundamental challenge when developing reliable and secure distributed programs is to support the cooperation of processes required to execute a common task, even when some of these processes fail. Failures may range from crashes to adversarial attacks by malicious processes. Cachin, Guerraoui, and Rodrigues present an introductory description of fundamental distributed programming abstractions together with algorithms to implement them in distributed systems, where processes are subject to crashes and malicious attacks. The authors follow an incremental approach by first introducing basic abstractions in simple distributed environments, before moving to more sophisticated abstractions and more challenging environments. Each core chapter is devoted to one topic, covering reliable broadcast, shared memory, consensus, and extensions of consensus. For every topic, many exercises and their solutions enhance the understanding This book represents the second edition of "Introduction to Reliable Distributed Programming". Its scope has been extended to include security against malicious actions by non-cooperating processes. This important domain has become widely known under the name "Byzantine fault-tolerance".

When it comes to choosing, using, and maintaining a database, understanding its internals is essential. But with so many distributed databases and tools available today, it’s often difficult to understand what each one offers and how they differ. With this practical guide, Alex Petrov guides developers through the concepts behind modern database and storage engine internals. Throughout the book, you’ll explore relevant material gleaned from numerous books, papers, blog posts, and the source code of several open source databases. These resources are listed at the end of parts one and two. You’ll discover that the most significant distinctions among many modern databases reside in subsystems that determine how storage is organized and how data is distributed. This book examines: Storage engines: Explore storage classification and taxonomy, and dive into B-Tree-based and immutable Log Structured storage engines, with differences and use-cases for each Storage building blocks: Learn how database files are organized to build efficient storage, using auxiliary data structures such as Page Cache, Buffer Pool and Write-Ahead Log Distributed systems: Learn step-by-step how nodes and processes connect and build complex communication patterns Database clusters: Which consistency models are commonly used by modern databases and how distributed storage systems achieve consistency

This second edition of Distributed Systems, Principles & Paradigms, covers the principles, advanced concepts, and technologies of distributed systems in detail, including: communication, replication, fault tolerance, and security. Intended for use in a senior/graduate level distributed systems course or by professionals, this text systematically shows how distributed systems are designed and implemented in real systems.