Designing Distributed Systems, 2nd Edition

Preface

Who Should Read This Book

At this point, nearly every developer is a developer or consumer (or both) of distributed systems. Even relatively simple mobile applications are backed with cloud APIs so that their data can be present on whatever device the customer happens to be using. Whether you are new to developing distributed systems or an expert with scars on your hands to prove it, the patterns and components described in this book can transform your development of distributed systems from art to science. Reusable components and patterns for distributed systems will enable you to focus on the core details of your application. This book will help any developer become better, faster, and more efficient at building distributed systems.

Why I Wrote This Book

Throughout my career as a developer of a variety of software systems, from web search to the cloud, I have built a large number of scalable, reliable distributed systems. Each of these systems was, by and large, built from scratch. In general, this is true of all distributed applications. Despite having many of the same concepts and even at times nearly identical logic, the ability to apply patterns or reuse components is often very, very challenging. This forced me to waste time reimplementing systems, and each system ended up less polished than it might have otherwise been.

The recent introduction of containers and container orchestrators fundamentally changed the landscape of distributed system development. Suddenly ...