A Distributed Systems Reading List

Introduction

I often argue that the toughest thing about distributed systems ischanging the way you think. The below is a collection of material I'vefound useful for motivating these changes.

The Google Infrastructure

Current "rocket science" in distributed systems.

• MapReduce
• Chubby Lock Manager
• Google File System
• BigTable
• Data Management for Internet-Scale Single-Sign-On

Experience at MySpace

One of the larger websites out there with a high write load which is not the norm (most are read dominated).

eBay

Interesting they dumped most of J2EE and use a lot of db partitioning. Check out their site upgrade tool as well.

• http://www.addsimplicity.com.nyud.net:8080/downloads/eBaySDForum2006-11-29.pdf

Adam Bosworth

Broad vision, way of the future type stuff.

• http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=337

Amazon

Somewhat about the technology but more interesting is the culture and organization they've created to work with it.

• http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=printer_friendly&pid=403&page=1
• http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=printer_friendly&pid=388&page=1
• http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1634.html - Similar to the above link
• http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1195702,00.html

Thought Provokers

Ramblings that make you think about the way you design. Noteverything can be solved with big servers, databases and transactions.

• On Designing and Deploying Internet Scale Services - James Hamilton
• Latency Exists, Cope! - Commentary on coping with latency and it's architectural impacts
• The Perils of Good Abstractions - Building the perfect API/interface is difficult
• http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/historical/archives/000456.html - Vogels, Epidemics
• Chaotic Perspectives - Large scale systems are everything developers dislike - unpredictable, unordered and parallel
• http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2007/04/29/3616/the-top-10-presentation-on-scaling-websites-twitter-flickr-bloglines-vox-and-more - A collection of scalable architecture papers from various of the large websites
• Memories, Guesses and Apologies - Pat Helland
• SOA and Newton's Universe - Pat Helland
• Why Distributed Computing? - Jim Waldo
• A Note on Distributed Computing - Waldo, Wollrath et al

Theory

• Distributed Computing Economics - Jim Gray
• Fallacies of Distributed Computing - Peter Deutsch
• Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process - also known as FLP [access requires account and/or payment, a free version can be found here]
• Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems. A method for handling the challenges of FLP
• Lamport Clocks - How do you establish a global view of time when each computer's clock is independent
• The Byzantine Generals Problem
• Lazy Replication: Exploiting the Semantics of Distributed Services

Paxos Consensus

Understanding this algorithm is the challenge. I would suggestreading "Paxos Made Simple" before the other papers and again afterward.

• The Part-Time Parliament - Leslie Lamport
• Paxos Made Simple - Leslie Lamport
• Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective - Chandra et al
• Revisiting the Paxos Algorithm - Lynch et al
• How to build a highly available system with consensus - Butler Lampson
• Implementing Fault-Tolerant Services Using the State Machine Approach: a Tutorial - Fred Schneider

Consistency Models

• CAP Conjecture - Consistency, Availability, Parition Tolerance cannot all be satisfied at once
• Consistency and Availability - Vogels
• Eventual Consistency - Vogels
• Avoiding Two-Phase Commit - Two phase commit avoidance approaches
• 2PC or not 2PC, Wherefore Art Thou XA? - Two phase commit isn't a silver bullet
• Life Beyond Distributed Transactions - Helland
• Starbucks doesn't do two phase commit - Asynchronous mechanisms at work