Building Distributed Systems

In today's digital landscape, distributed systems are the backbone of scalable and reliable applications, powering everything from e-commerce giants to real-time streaming services. This book, Building Distributed Systems, provides a practical and accessible guide to understanding and constructing these complex architectures, bridging the gap between foundational theory and real-world application.

In this book, we will dive into the fundamentals of distributed systems, understand how computing evolved and what are some critical aspects of these systems that software architects and engineers must always be aware of to help them make design and implementation decisions. Furthermore, we will learn to make tradeoff decisions grounded on key objectives that our systems should focus on versus what may not be so important for each specific use case.

By the end of this book, you will possess a strong understanding of distributed systems and be equipped to design, build, and deploy scalable and reliable applications. You will gain practical insights into modern architectures, enabling you to confidently tackle the challenges of building and maintaining distributed systems in any environment.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
● Architect microservices, implement caching, and deploy resilient distributed systems.
● Master event-driven patterns, traffic routing, and cloud platform selection.
● Design for consistency, availability, and implement robust data strategies.
● Optimize performance via CI/CD, load balancing, and advanced caching.
● Engineer fault-tolerant systems using CQRS, circuit breakers, and cloud services.
● Navigate CAP theorem trade-offs and build observable distributed architectures.
● Deploy with feature flags, Kubernetes, and ensure operational readiness.
● Build scalable systems, manage data, and optimize cloud infrastructure.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is for software engineers, architects, and computer science students eager to build scalable internet systems. A basic understanding of software design principles is beneficial for those seeking practical, real-world implementations.

1. Distributed Systems Fundamentals
2. Monoliths and Microservices
3. Architecture of Distributed Systems
4. Consistency and Availability
5. Design for Speed and Efficiency
6. Event-driven Systems
7. Traffic Routing Strategies
8. Building Resilient Systems
9. Data Storage Strategies
10. Observability and Operational Readiness
11. Distributed Caching
12. Choosing Platform and Technologies
13. Deployment Strategies and Production Readiness

Ranjit Aneesh is an engineering leader with two decades of experience building large scale distributed systems. He currently leads teams at Capital One building systems to support the future of banking. Ranjit has previously managed serverless services at AWS Lambda where he led programs to increase the developer friendliness, feature set and scale of the service. He also built Capital One’s fraud resolution systems which handlesmillions of transactions. Ranjit specializes in high-scale architecture design, microservices, and event- driven systems that power critical financial services. Ranjit has previously built a startup that specialized in digital media and online payments for digital publishers.