Foundations of Scalable Systems

Chapter 16. Final Tips for Success

Let’s be blunt. Building scalable distributed systems is hard!

Distributed systems by their very nature are complex, with multiple failure modes that you must take into consideration, and design to handle all eventualities. It gets even trickier when your applications are stressed by high request volumes and rapidly growing data resources.

Applications at scale require numerous, cooperating hardware and software components that collectively create the capacity to achieve low latencies and high throughput. Your challenge is to compose all these moving parts into an application that satisfies requirements and doesn’t cost you the earth to run.

In this book I’ve covered the broad landscape of principles, architectures, mechanisms, and technologies that are foundational to scalable distributed systems. Armed with this knowledge, you can start to design and build large-scale applications.

I suspect that you will not be surprised to hear that this is not the end of the story. We all operate in an ever-changing landscape of new application requirements and new hardware and software technologies. While the underlying principles of distributed systems still hold (for the foreseeable future anyway—quantum physics might change things one day), new programming abstractions, platform models, and hardware make it easier for you to build more complex systems with increased performance, scalability, and resilience. The metaphorical train that propels us through ...