distributed-systems/README.md

# awesome-distributed-systems

A (hopefully) curated list on awesome material on distributed systems, inspired by
other awesome frameworks like [awesome-python](https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python).
Most links will tend to be readings on architecture itself rather than code itself.

## Bootcamp
Read things here before you start.
- [CAP Theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem), Also [plain english](http://ksat.me/a-plain-english-introduction-to-cap-theorem/) explanation
- [Fallacies of Distributed Computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing), expect things to break, *everything*
- [Distributed systems theory for the distributed engineer](http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/distributed-systems-theory-for-the-distributed-systems-engineer/), most of the papers/books in the blog might reappear in this list again. Still a good BFS approach to distributed systems.
- [FLP Impossibility Result (paper)](http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/arvind/cs425/doc/fischer.pdf), an easier [blog post](http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/a-brief-tour-of-flp-impossibility/) to follow along
- [An Introduction to Distributed Systems](https://github.com/aphyr/distsys-class) @aphyr's excellent introduction to distributed systems 

## Books
- [Distributed Systems for fun and profit](http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html) [Free]
- [Distributed Systems Principles and Paradigms, Andrew Tanenbaum](http://www.amazon.com/Distributed-Systems-Principles-Paradigms-2nd/dp/0132392275) [Amazon Link]
- [Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems](http://www.aosabook.org/en/distsys.html) [Free]
- [Principles of Distributed Systems](http://dcg.ethz.ch/lectures/podc_allstars/lecture/podc.pdf) [ETH Zurich University]
- [Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors](http://www.erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf), Joe Amstrong's (Author of Erlang) PhD thesis 

## Papers
Must read papers on distributed systems. While nearly *all* of Lamport's work should feature here, just adding a few that *must* be read.
- [Times, Clocks and Ordering of Events in Distributed Systems](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf) Lamport's paper, the Quintessential distributed systems primer

### Storage & Databases
- [Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key Value Store](http://bnrg.eecs.berkeley.edu/~randy/Courses/CS294.F07/Dynamo.pdf)
- [Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf)
- [The Google File System](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/gfs-sosp2003.pdf)
- [Cassandra: A Decentralized Structured Storage System](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.161.6751&rep=rep1&type=pdf) Inspired heavily by Dynamo
- [CRUSH: Controlled, Scalable, Decentralized Placement of Replicated Data](http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/weil-sc06.pdf), Basis of Ceph distributed storage system

### Messaging systems
- [The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction](http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying), a somewhat long read, but covers brilliantly on logs, which are at the heart of most distributed systems
- [Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing](http://notes.stephenholiday.com/Kafka.pdf)

### Distributed Consensus
- [The Part Time Parliament](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf) Paxos, Lamport's original Paxos paper, a bit difficult to understand, may require multiple passes
- [Paxos Made Simple](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf), a more terse readable Paxos paper by Lamport himself. Shorter and more easier compared to the original.
- [The Chubby Lock Service for loosely coupled distributed systems](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/chubby-osdi06.pdf) Google's lock service used for loosely coupled distributed systems. Sort of Paxos as a Service for building other distributed systems. Primary inspiration behind other Service Discovery & Coordination tools like Zookeeper, etcd, Consul etc.
- [Paxos made live - An engineering perspective](http://research.google.com/archive/paxos_made_live.html) Google's learning while implementing systems atop of Paxos. Demonstrates various practical issues encountered while implementing a theoritical concept.
- [Raft Consensus Algorithm](https://raftconsensus.github.io/) An alternative to Paxos for distributed consensus, that is much simpler to understand. Do checkout an [interesting visualization of raft](http://thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/)

### Testing, monitoring and tracing
While designing distributed systems are hard enough, testing them is even harder. 
- [Dapper](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/36356.pdf), Google's large scale distributed-systems tracing infrastructure, this was also the basis for the design of open source projects such as [Zipkin](http://zipkin.io/), [Pinpoint](https://github.com/naver/pinpoint) and [HTrace](http://htrace.incubator.apache.org/).

## Courses
- [Cloud Computing Concepts](https://class.coursera.org/cloudcomputing-001), University of Illinois
- [CMU: Distributed Systems](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/15-440/F12/syllabus.html) in Go Programming Language
- [Software Defined Networking](https://www.coursera.org/course/sdn) , Georgia Tech.
- [ETH Zurich: Distributed Systems](http://dcg.ethz.ch/lectures/podc_allstars/)
- [ETH Zurich: Distributed Systems Part 2](http://dcg.ethz.ch/lectures/distsys), covers  Distributed control algorithms, communication models, fault-tolerance among other things. In particular fault tolerence issues (models, consensus, agreement) and replication issues (2PC,3PC, Paxos), which are critical in understanding distributed systems are explained in great detail.

## Blogs and other reading links
- [Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods](http://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods/)
- [High Scalability](http://highscalability.com/) Several architectures of huge internet services, for eg [twitter](http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-twitter-uses-to-deal-with-150m-active-users.html), [whatsapp](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html)
- [There is No Now](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2745385), Problems with simultaneity in distributed systems
- [Turing Lecture: The Computer Science of Concurrency: The Early Years](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/6/187316-turing-lecture-the-computer-science-of-concurrency/fulltext), An article by Leslie Lamport on concurrency
- [The Paper Trail](http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/tag/distributed-systems/) blog, a very readable blog covering various aspects of distributed systems
- [aphyr](https://aphyr.com/tags/Distributed-Systems), Posts on [jepsen](https://github.com/aphyr/jepsen) series are pretty awesome
- [All Things Distributed](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/) - Wernel Vogel's (Amazon CTO) blog on distributed systems 
- [Distributed Systems: Take Responsibility for Failover](http://ivolo.me/distributed-systems-take-responsibility-for-failover/)
- [The C10K problem](http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html)
- [On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services](http://static.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton/hamilton_html/)
- [Files are hard](http://danluu.com/file-consistency/) A blog post on filesystem consistency, pretty important to read if you are into distributed storage or databases.
- [Distributed Systems Testing: The Lost World](http://tagide.com/blog/research/distributed-systems-testing-the-lost-world/) Testing distributed systems are hard enough, a well researched blog post which again covers a lot of links to various approaches and other papers

## Meta Lists
Other lists like this one
- [Readings in distributed systems](http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings-in-distributed-systems.html)
- [Distributed Systems meta list](https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368)
- [List of required readings for Distributed Systems](http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/READINGS/required/) Part of CMU's Engineering Distributed Systems course
- [The Distributed Reader](http://reiddraper.github.io/distreader/)
- [A Distributed Systems Reading List](https://dancres.github.io/Pages/), A collection of material, mostly papers on Distributed Systems Theory as well as seminal industry papers 
- [Distributed Systems Readings](https://henryr.github.io/distributed-systems-readings/), A comprehensive list of online courses related to distributed systems