HN Explorer

Ask HN: Distributed Systems Course Suggestions

38 points by codenlearn ↗ HN
I'm looking for course suggestions in intermediate to advanced topics in Distributed systems and operating systems.

Example: this course on Raft by David Beazley https://www.dabeaz.com/raft.html.

Any suggestions/help/advice is much appreaciated.

6 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 25.2 ms ] thread
vaughnegut
I went down the same rabbit hole not too long ago. My top two: 1. Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit [0]: Introduction to all the core concepts and (about as importantly) has a reading list you can use to learn more at the end of each chapter.

2. MIT 6.5840 [1]: The MIT distributed systems class has links to all readings, lectures, and even assignments (openly available git repos you can clone). I worked my way through most of it and it was excellent. Read the paper, watch the video lecture (students in the videos asked good questions I would have wanted to ask), and do the assignments. It was far more approachable than I anticipated but very rigorous.

Both are excellent. I did the first one and then most of the second and learned a lot. In either case, reading papers was really illuminating (especially when paired with the context form tje lecture or the book).

[0] https://book.mixu.net/distsys/index.html [1] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html

simon_acca
This lecture series by Martin Kleppman is excellent: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_HdUFe... as well as his book “ Designing Data-Intensive Applications”

Reading trough the Jepsen analyses is also invaluable (not for the faint hearted, you might find some software that is dear to you absolutely torn to shreds in there): https://jepsen.io/analyses

Finally, all of the classic papers are worth a read: spanner, bigtable, google file system, dynamodb, chubby, dapper, the google paxos engineering paper, the main ones from Lamport… that said distributed system is a vast field, resources as far apart as the bitcoin paper or the original Shapiro paper on CRDTs might be of interest :)

codenlearn
The jespen analysis is amazing, thank you for sharing it.