Designing Distributed Systems, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1. Introduction

Today’s world of always-on applications and APIs has availability and reliability requirements that would have been required of only a handful of mission-critical services around the globe only a few decades ago. Likewise, the potential for rapid, viral growth of a service means that every application has to be built to scale nearly instantly in response to user demand. These constraints and requirements mean that almost every application that is built—whether it is a consumer mobile app or a backend payments application—needs to be a distributed system.

But building distributed systems is challenging. Often, they are one-off bespoke solutions. In this way, distributed system development bears a striking resemblance to the world of software development prior to the development of modern object-oriented programming languages. Fortunately, as with the development of object-oriented languages, there have been technological advances that have dramatically reduced the challenges of building distributed systems. In this case, it is the rising popularity of containers and container orchestrators. As with the concept of objects within object-oriented programming, these containerized building blocks are the basis for the development of reusable components and patterns that dramatically simplify and make accessible the practices of building reliable distributed systems. In the following introduction, we give a brief history of the developments that have led to where ...