Think Distributed Systems

Reason confidently about distributed systems.

All modern software is distributed. Let’s say that again—all modern software is distributed. Whether you’re building mobile utilities, microservices, or massive cloud native enterprise applications, creating efficient distributed systems requires you to think differently about failure, performance, network services, resource usage, latency, and much more. This clearly-written book guides you into the mindset you’ll need to design, develop, and deploy scalable and reliable distributed systems.

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 and replication
- Consensus

Distributed systems can be complex and challenging to understand. You’ll love how the insightful analogies, practical examples, helpful illustrations, and accurate definitions illuminate even the most difficult topics. Think Distributed Systems 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 book

Think Distributed Systems provides accurate and concise mental models to help you reason confidently about distributed systems. It delivers a big picture view of distributed systems along with a detailed look at key topics like partitioning, replication, durable executions, and consensus protocols. You’ll learn how to handle component and network failures as you develop both the skills and the intuition to design, implement, and understand the most common types of distributed systems you’ll encounter.