awesome-distributed-systems

A (hopefully) curated list on awesome material on distributed systems, inspired by other awesome frameworks like 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, Also plain english explanation
• Fallacies of Distributed Computing, expect things to break, everything
• Distributed systems theory for the distributed 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), an easier blog post to follow along

Books

• Distributed Systems for fun and profit [Free]
• Distributed Systems Principles and Paradigms, Andrew Tanenbaum [Amazon Link]
• Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems [Free]
• Principles of Distributed Systems [ETH Zurich University]

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 Lamport's paper, the Quintessential distributed systems primer

Storage & Databases

• Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key Value Store
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
• The Google File System
• Cassandra: A Decentralized Structured Storage System Inspired heavily by Dynamo
• CRUSH: Controlled, Scalable, Decentralized Placement of Replicated Data, Basis of Ceph distributed storage system

Distributed Consensus

• The Part Time Parliament Paxos, Lamport's original Paxos paper, a bit difficult to understand, may require multiple passes
• Paxos Made Simple, 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 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 Google's learning while implementing systems atop of Paxos. Demonstrates various practical issues encountered while implementing a theoritical concept.
• Raft Consensus Algorithm An alternative to Paxos for distributed consensus, that is much simpler to understand. Do checkout an interesting visualization of raft

Courses

• Cloud Computing Concepts, University of Illinois
• CMU: Distributed Systems in Go Programming Language
• Software Defined Networking , Georgia Tech.
• ETH Zurich: Distributed Systems

Blogs and other reading links

• Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
• High Scalability Several architectures of huge internet services, for eg twitter, whatsapp
• There is No Now, Problems with simultaneity in distributed systems
• Turing Lecture: The Computer Science of Concurrency: The Early Years, An article by Leslie Lamport on concurrency
• aphyr, Posts on jepsen series are pretty awesome
• All Things Distributed - Wernel Vogel's (Amazon CTO) blog on distributed systems
• Distributed Systems: Take Responsibility for Failover
• The C10K problem
• On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services

Meta Lists

Other lists like this one

• Readings in distributed systems
• Distributed Systems meta list
• List of required readings for Distributed Systems Part of CMU's Engineering Distributed Systems course
• The Distributed Reader
• A Distributed Systems Reading List, A collection of material, mostly papers on Distributed Systems Theory as well as seminal industry papers
• Distributed Systems Readings, A comprehensive list of online courses related to distributed systems