Ask HN: Recommendations for a book on Distributed Systems?

We used Coulouris in our Distributed Systems course back in 2010, it covers all the fundamentals used in today's modern systems.

Things like ring quorums are implemented by Cassandra and other systems, I just didn't know about them (ie Cassandra et al...) to put a face to the name back then.

One thing to do is to start reading papers, and branch out from there. There's a few major ones like the Map-Reduce Paper, BigTable, Dremel, Raft, perhaps Paxos etc... and use the citations to then deepen your understanding.

Also there's plenty of people here who can always answer questions. :)

Cheers.

I recommend The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook.

https://www.manning.com/books/the-little-elixir-and-otp-guid...

It's easier to build distributed apps with Elixir because of Erlang's OTP. Check it out, I'm sure it'll be interesting for you.

It's not released yet, but I've been reading the early release version of Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032175.do). I've found it pretty useful and well-written thus far. He does a good job of explaining concepts and then tying them to real-world implementations and examples. It's a good balance of theory and practical knowledge.

Not exactly a book, but Yale CS hosts a set of notes from a course of theirs, almost 500 pages.

http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/465/notes.pdf

To add to what other's have said I've found "Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems" https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Scalability-Erlang-OTP-Faul... to pretty useful even though I don't care about Erlang (that much), because the last 4 chapters are about designing scalable and fault tolerant distributed systems in generic terms that apply even to non-Erlang systems.

Also as a side note, does anyone know why are the Amazon categories so bad? http://prntscr.com/dr3itj This book is classified in "javascript".

You might also find this book helpful https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Performance-Enterprise-Brenda...

since it's essentially about how to perf measure, and debug computers in the cloud which is the annoying part of distributed systems.

Also you should keep in mind that there are some books that are specifically about doing distributed systems using a particular framework e.g. this one on using Akka on JVM https://www.amazon.com/Akka-Action-Raymond-Roestenburg/dp/16...

These are some decent notes:

http://videlalvaro.github.io/2015/12/learning-about-distribu...

http://dancres.github.io/Pages/

http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html

There does not seem to be a lot out there that bridges the gap between very theoretical papers and real world usage. There's also a lot of handwaving about how "distributed systems are hard!", which is absolutely not telling me something I did not already know.

Haven't updated this in quite a while, but here's a list of reading lists + relevant books.

https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368

pacemaker/corosync documentation @ http://clusterlabs.org/

nontrivial distributed systems are like crypto: don't roll your own primitives unless you are a masochist, fetishist, time-rich or forced to.

I like https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distributed-algorithms.

Reading all of Lamport's papers is a one-stop shop for the theoretical aspect of distributed systems. He has a page [0] that collects a short comments on his own papers, starting from that page to get a sense of the overview.

0. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

I would suggest "Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming" (https://www.amazon.de/Introduction-Reliable-Secure-Distribut...).

I never read the book, but took a course with author based on this book. It was fun and interesting; covering both basic and advanced concepts in distributed systems.

I really enjoyed Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit. [0]

0: http://book.mixu.net/distsys/single-page.html

Reviews for textbooks (which these are) are always underwhelming due to the uneven quality of CS classes and students.

This was my favorite back in 2008. If I can recall accurately the fundamentals it covers should still apply.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum and 1 more Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms (2nd Edition) 2nd Edition ISBN-13: 978-0132392273, ISBN-10: 0132392275

I find redis-cluster spec one of the simplest ways to explain clustering, HA, leader election. https://redis.io/topics/cluster-spec