Any significant web application quickly becomes a distributed system.

This is both good news and bad news: distributed systems can help provide fault tolerance and low latency global applications, but at the cost of strong consistency guarantees. Without a solid understanding of distributed systems principles, it is hard to achieve the benefits of distributed systems without succumbing to the hazards.

Our course focuses on practical considerations for professional software engineers. We will cover enough theory to help students make good choices when working on or with distributed systems.

Classes

1. Introduction
2. Background knowledge review
3. Communication and encoding
4. Replication
5. Partitioning
6. Transactions
7. Consistency
8. Distributed transactions and consensus
9. Leaderless distributed databases
10. Batch processing
11. Stream processing
12. Revision

Projects and exercises

Among other exercises, you will implement Raft (a simplified alternative to Paxos) and use your implementation to solve subsequent problems.

Assumed knowledge

This course assumes a strong grasp of operating systems and computer networking.

Available sessions