The system design library
Search and filter every curated system design video, article, repository and paper in one place.
18 resources
Concurrent and Distributed Systems (Cambridge lecture notes)
Eight lectures on time, broadcast, replication, consensus and transactions, with notes, slides and video. Free from the author under CC BY-SA.
BooksIntermediateFree from the authorBy Martin Kleppmann · University of Cambridge
Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit
A short, readable tour of time, consistency and replication in distributed systems, free to read online from the author.
BooksBeginnerFree from the authorBy Mikito Takada · mixu.net
All Things Distributed
The Amazon CTO's blog on architecture, scale and the history of AWS services.
BlogsIntermediateBy Werner Vogels · Amazon
Amazon S3 strong consistency
What strong read-after-write consistency means for S3 and how it simplifies applications.
DocumentationIntermediateBy Amazon Web Services
CAP Twelve Years Later: How the Rules Have Changed
The author of the CAP conjecture revisits it and explains the trade-offs more carefully.
BlogsAdvancedRead hereBy Eric Brewer · InfoQ
Cassandra architecture overview
The ring, replication, tunable consistency and the storage engine of Cassandra.
DocumentationIntermediateBy Apache Cassandra · Apache Software Foundation
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
The standard book on data systems: storage engines, replication, partitioning, transactions, batch and stream processing.
BooksIntermediateSold by publisherBy Martin Kleppmann · O'Reilly
Eventually Consistent - Revisited
Amazon's CTO explains the consistency models (strong, eventual, read-your-writes, monotonic) and why large systems choose among them.
BlogsIntermediateBy Werner Vogels · Amazon
Jepsen analyses
Tests of real databases under failure, showing which consistency promises hold.
BlogsAdvancedBy Kyle Kingsbury · Jepsen
Please stop calling databases CP or AP
Why the CAP labels hide more than they reveal, and what to ask instead.
BlogsAdvancedBy Martin Kleppmann · martin.kleppmann.com
PostgreSQL: Introduction to MVCC
How PostgreSQL lets readers and writers work without blocking each other using multiple row versions.
DocumentationIntermediateBy PostgreSQL Global Development Group · PostgreSQL
Read Consistency with Database Replicas at Shopify
At Shopify, we’ve long used database replication for redundancy and failure recovery, but only fairly recently started to explore the potential of replicas as an alternative read-only data source for applications.
Case StudiesIntermediateRead hereBy Shopify engineers · Shopify
Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database (paper)
A globally distributed database that gives strongly consistent transactions by combining consensus groups with clocks whose uncertainty is bounded.
PapersAdvancedBy Corbett et al. · Google
Amazon Dynamo: Highly Available Key-Value Store
Werner Vogels' write-up of the design that inspired DynamoDB, Cassandra and Riak.
Case StudiesAdvancedRead hereBy Werner Vogels · Amazon
MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems
Free university course on fault tolerance, replication and consensus with Go labs.
CoursesAdvancedBy Robert Morris · MIT
Martin Kleppmann's Blog
Essays on distributed systems, CRDTs, consistency and data-intensive design.
BlogsAdvancedBy Martin Kleppmann · martin.kleppmann.com
Martin Kleppmann: Distributed Systems Lectures
Cambridge lecture series covering time, broadcast, replication, consensus and consistency.
YouTubeAdvancedBy Martin Kleppmann · University of Cambridge
Arpit Bhayani: Asli Engineering
Internals of databases, caches and distributed algorithms with practical examples.
YouTubeAdvancedBy Arpit Bhayani · Asli Engineering