The Distributed Systems Manual

By

Roberto Vitillo

Learning to design, build, and maintain distributed systems is the single best thing you can do as a software engineer if you desire a higher salary or a better position. Don't take my word for it - according to Stack Overflow's 2020 developer survey, the best-paid engineering roles, like Site Reliability Engineering, require distributed systems expertise.

Designing large-scale distributed systems requires experience and a firm grasp of the core principles. By learning those, you will add a powerful tool to your toolbelt - one that will make you stand out from the crowd. There is more to designing systems than connecting boxes with arrows - that's the easy part. The hard part is understanding failure modes and trade-offs.

I recall how hard it was to find the right information when I first started learning about distributed systems. I was looking for a pragmatic and timeless guide covering all the angles on the subject, but there was nothing like it. Some books were too theoretical, while others felt like marketing material for a technology stack that would be obsolete in a few years. I spent hours trying to connect the missing dots without a solid grasp of the fundamentals.

This is why I decided to write a book to teach the core principles of large-scale distributed systems. The book contains knowledge I have used over the years to solve concrete problems, the kind that needs to scale to millions of requests per second, and billions of devices. But, no matter the scale of the systems you work on today, the core principles are universal.

After reading the book, you are not going to look at a network calls the same way. And you will start applying your newly gained knowledge from day one at your job and on personal projects. Armed with the fundamentals, you will have the tools to understand technical whitepapers, build systems of your own, and nail interviews.