Distributed Systems Foundations

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Why distribute, and why not

Distribution buys capacity, latency and fault tolerance. It sells you partial failure, which is the hardest class of bug there is.

Kleppmann (Cambridge) on the reasons to make a system distributed, then the reasons not to (7:03-14:36)

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Source videos · 8

Martin Kleppmann (Cambridge)
Author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications; his Cambridge distributed systems course is posted in full. The academic anchor for this track, in the way Damodaran is for valuation.
Distributed Systems 1.1: Introduction
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Martin Kleppmann (Cambridge)
Author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications; his Cambridge distributed systems course is posted in full. The academic anchor for this track, in the way Damodaran is for valuation.
Distributed Systems 2.1: The Two Generals Problem
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Martin Kleppmann (Cambridge)
Author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications; his Cambridge distributed systems course is posted in full. The academic anchor for this track, in the way Damodaran is for valuation.
Distributed Systems 5.1: Replication
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Martin Kleppmann (Cambridge)
Author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications; his Cambridge distributed systems course is posted in full. The academic anchor for this track, in the way Damodaran is for valuation.
Distributed Systems 6.1: Consensus
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Aced (formerly Exponent)
The largest library of full mock interviews with real PMs and engineers. Mocks are the value; the short explainers are thinner.
Database Replication Explained (in 5 Minutes)
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Hello Interview
Run by current and former Meta staff engineers who conduct these interviews. Long-form and interview-specific rather than general distributed-systems teaching.
Message Queues in System Design Interviews w/ Meta Staff Engineer
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Arpit Bhayani
Systems engineer. Strongest on the production concerns that interview content skips: retries, idempotency, real failure.
Build a Robust Payments Service Using Idempotency Keys
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ByteByteGo
Alex Xu, author of the System Design Interview books. Animated, tightly-scripted explainers — the closest thing to a canon for this format.
Top 7 Most-Used Distributed System Patterns
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