Distributed Systems & Architecture
From single machine to global scale — core distributed systems theory, storage & computing, containerization, and observability.
Prerequisites
Requires system foundations. Understanding of networking, threading, concurrency (Vols 3-4), and basic backend development experience.
Completion Milestone: Understand core distributed systems challenges, CAP/FLP implications, Raft consensus, distributed storage/computing models, K8s orchestration, and observability's three pillars.
Chapter 1 Distributed Systems Overview Completed
Fallacies, CAP, FLP, clock models — know the difficulty from the start.
Chapter 2 RPC & Serialization Completed
gRPC, Protobuf encoding, Thrift — remote calling fundamentals.
Chapter 3 Consistency & Consensus Completed
Raft complete (election/replication/safety), Paxos intuition, ZAB.
Chapter 4 Distributed Storage Completed
Consistent hashing, HDFS, Cassandra, Spanner — the art of data placement.
Chapter 5 Distributed Computing Completed
MapReduce, Spark RDD, DataFrame — divide and conquer computation.
Chapter 6 Microservices Architecture Completed
Service discovery, gateway, circuit breakers, Saga.
Chapter 7 Containerization & Orchestration Completed
Namespaces/Cgroups, Docker layering, K8s Pod/Service/Deployment/HPA.
Chapter 8 Observability Completed
Metrics/Traces/Logs three pillars, OpenTelemetry, production deployment.
Chapter 9 SRE Basics Completed
SLI/SLO/Error Budgets, Toil & Automation, On-call & Incident management.
Chapter 10 IaC & GitOps Completed
Terraform state & modules, environment isolation, Secrets management, Argo CD/Flux reconciliation.
Chapter 11 Kubernetes Production Practices Completed
Ingress/NetworkPolicy, StatefulSet/PV/PVC, resource quotas, multi-cluster isolation, production checklist.
Chapter 12 Observability Deep Dive Completed
Four golden signals/USE/RED, cardinality control, alert deduplication, Grafana design, RUM & synthetic monitoring.
12 chapters total, all completed