Brendan Burns - Designing Distributed Systems

This book is organized into a 4 parts as follows:

Introduces distributed systems and explains why patterns andreusable components can make such a difference in the rapid developmentof reliable distributed systems.

Chapters discuss reusable patterns and components thatoccur on individual nodes within a distributed system. It covers theside-car, adapter, and ambassador single-node patterns.

Chapters cover multi-node distributed patterns for long-running serving systems like web applications. Patterns for replicating, scaling, and master election are discussed.

Chapters cover distributed system patterns forlarge-scale batch data processing covering work queues, event-basedprocessing, and coordinated workflows.

If you are an experienced distributed systems engineer, you can likelyskip the first couple of chapters, though you may want to skim themto understand how we expect these patterns to be applied and why wethink the general notion of distributed system patterns is so important.

Everyone will likely find utility in the single-node patterns as theyare the most generic and most reusable patterns in the book.

Depending on your goals and the systems you are interested in developing,you can choose to focus on either large-scale big data patterns, orpatterns for long-running servers (or both). The two partsare largely independent from each other and can be read in any order.

Likewise, if you have extensive distributed system experience, you mayfind that some of the early patterns chapters (e.g., onnaming, discovery, and load balancing) are redundant with what youalready know, so feel free to skim through to gain the high-level insightsbut dont forget to look at all of the pretty pictures!