ZooKeeper for the Skeptical Architect
Camille Fournier·2014·Philly ETE·42 minAn honest tour of what ZooKeeper is good for, what it isn't, and the operational pain of running a consensus system in anger.
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.
Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices
Caitie McCaffrey·2017·J on the BeachA pragmatic protocol for keeping a multi-service transaction consistent without two-phase commit, built on a fault-tolerant log of compensating actions.