Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices
Caitie McCaffrey·2017·J on the Beach·41 minA pragmatic protocol for keeping a multi-service transaction consistent without two-phase commit, built on a fault-tolerant log of compensating actions.
Building Scalable Stateful Services
Caitie McCaffrey·2015·Strange LoopStateless services are easy to scale but expensive to use. McCaffrey makes the case for putting state back in the service — and shows how Scuba, Ringpop, and Orleans do it.
The World Is Asynchronous
Werner Vogels·2022·AWS re:InventVogels makes the case that loose coupling and event-driven architecture aren't a style choice — they're how the world actually works.
When To Use Microservices (And When Not To!)
Sam Newman, Martin Fowler·2020·GOTONewman and Fowler talk through the cases where microservices earn their keep — and the much larger set where they don't.
Distributed Systems Are a UX Problem
Tyler Treat·2018·QConTreat reframes consistency, latency, and partial failure as user-facing concerns — and shows what good distributed-system UX looks like.
Building a Distributed Message Log from Scratch
Tyler Treat·2018·GOTOWhat you learn when you implement a Kafka-style log yourself: replication, leader election, fsync semantics, and the limits of 'just use a queue.'
The Language of the System
Rich Hickey·2017·Clojure ConjHickey on the fact that the language inside your process is rarely the language between your processes — and what that should imply for system design.