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Understanding Distributed Systems
A practical tour of communication, coordination, scalability and resiliency for working engineers.
By Roberto Vitillo · Roberto Vitillo · Added 2026-10-12
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Ideas you will meet
- Distributed Systems
- Consensus, time, failure and the fundamentals of scale-out.
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A path through videos, articles, other case studies and code on the same ideas as Understanding Distributed Systems.
Warm upGet the vocabulary first.
Books · Free from the author
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.
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Computer Networks: A Systems Approach
How networks are built and why: protocols, routing, congestion control and the internet's architecture. The authors publish it free online under CC BY 4.0.
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WatchHow others solve the same problem, on video.
Videos belong to their creators and play from YouTube. More on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
ReadEngineers explain it in their own words.
Blogs · Free from the author · Read here
Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems
A full chapter on the building blocks of large websites: availability, performance, reliability, scalability, caches, proxies, indexes, load balancers and queues. Free to read here under CC BY 3.0.
The Architecture of Open Source ApplicationsBeginner40 min
Papers · Read here
Facebook’s photo storage
This paper describes Haystack, an object storage system optimized for Facebook’s Photos application. Facebook currently stores over 260 billion images, which translates to over 20 petabytes of data.
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See it in another companyThe same ideas, a different system.
Case Studies · Read here
Aroma: Using ML for Code Recommendation at Facebook
Thousands of engineers write the code to create our apps, which serve billions of people worldwide. This is no trivial task—our services have grown so diverse and complex that the codebase contains…
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Case Studies · Read here
Brooklin: Distributed Service for Near Real-Time Data Streaming at LinkedIn
Brooklin—a distributed service for streaming data in near real-time and at scale—has been running in production at LinkedIn since 2016, powering thousands of data streams and over 2 trillion messages per day. Today, w...
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Read the codeSee how it looks when it is real.
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