Understanding Distributed Systems

Roberto Vitillo has worked in the technology industry for over ten years as a software engineer, technical lead, and manager. He joined Microsoft in 2017 to work on an internal telemetry SaaS. Since then, he has assisted in the launch of several public SaaS products, including Playfab and Customer Insights. He is in charge of one of the world's largest data ingestion platforms, which processes millions of events per second from billions of devices worldwide.

Learning to build distributed systems, especially large-scale ones, is difficult. There isn't a scarcity of information available. On the subject, you can find academic papers, engineering blogs, and even books. The issue is that the available information is dispersed throughout, and if you were to plot it on a spectrum from theory to practice, you would find a lot of material at the two ends but little in the middle.

That is why Roberto Vitillo decided to write a book that combines the fundamental theoretical and practical concepts of distributed systems so that you don't have to waste time connecting the dots. This book will walk you through the fundamentals of large-scale distributed systems, providing just enough detail and external references to allow you to delve deeper. Based on his experience building large distributed systems that scale to millions of requests per second and billions of devices, Roberto Vitillo wishes this guide existed when he first started out.

Understanding Distributed Systems is for you if you work on the backend of web or mobile applications (or would like to!). You must be familiar with the network stack, data consistency models, scalability and reliability patterns, observability best practices, and much more when developing distributed applications. Although you can build applications without knowing much about it, you will end up spending hours debugging and re-architecting them, learning hard lessons that you could have learned much faster and in a much less painful way.

Understanding Distributed Systems may not be for you if you have several years of experience designing and building highly available and fault-tolerant applications that scale to millions of users. As an expert, you're probably looking for depth rather than breadth, and this book focuses on the latter because covering the field otherwise would be impossible.

Author: Roberto Vitillo

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Distributed-Systems-Second-applications-ebook/dp/B09YLRB7QV/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 25 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #87,059 in Kindle Store

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