Think Distributed Systems: Mental models of reliable and scalable software

Reason confidently about distributed systems.

Distributed systems are complex—but they’re also everywhere in modern software. A fuzzy understanding of how distributed systems work is no longer an option. Think Distributed Systems helps you develop clear and dependable mental models of distributed systems, so you can reason about complex problems with confidence. You’ll be able to reason confidently about your systems, and ensure they’re functional, scalable, and always reliable.

In Think Distributed Systems you’ll find a beautifully illustrated collection of mental models for:

• Correctness, scalability, and reliability
• Failure detection, and mitigation
• Message processing
• Partitioning and replication
• Consensus

You’ll love how the insightful analogies, practical examples, helpful illustrations, and accurate definitions in Think Distributed Systems illuminate even the most difficult topics. The book breaks down this wide-ranging topic into clear categories like transactions, message processing, and distributed consensus. In every chapter, you’ll find a new “aha!” moment.

About the technology

Almost all modern software is distributed. To create production-quality applications, you need to think differently about failure, performance, network services, latency, resource usage, and much more. This clearly-written book equips you with the skills and the mindset you need to design, develop, and deploy scalable and reliable distributed systems.

About the book

In Think Distributed Systems you’ll find a beautifully illustrated collection of mental models for:

• Correctness, scalability, and reliability
• Failure tolerance, detection, and mitigation
• Message processing
• Partitioning, replication, consensus, and more!

This practical book delivers both the big picture view and ground-level details you need to understand the distributed systems you’ll encounter on the job. Author Dominik Tornow breaks down distributed system design into useful categories like component and network failures, transactions, durable executions, and distributed consensus. You’ll love how the elegant analogies, examples, illustrations, and definitions clarify even the most difficult concepts.

About the author

Dominik Tornow has studied and practiced software systems engineering over 20 years. He is the founder and CEO of Resonate HQ, Inc.

Table of Contents

1 Thinking in distributed systems: Models, mindsets, and mechanics
2 System models, order, and time
3 Failure tolerance
4 Message delivery and processing
5 Transactions
6 Distributed transactions
7 Partitioning
8 Replication
9 Consistency
10 Distributed consensus
11 Durable executions
12 Cloud and services