Designing Distributed Systems

I think you will agree that book name Designing Distributed Systems: Patterns and Paradigms for Scalable, Reliable services sounds very promising. The book was published in 2018 and it's pretended to be a catalog of modern system design patterns like GoF patterns for software design 20 years ago.
Spoiler: it did not.

Actually the book describes very basic stuff like sidecar, load balancing, sharding, leader election and some others. Patterns are presented without deep details with focus on Kubernetes objects creation.

For example: this is sharding, it helps to distribute the data across replicas, consistent hashing can be use to define appropriate shards, here is the k8s service and stateful set to do that.

One more thing that I don't like that the book contains too much recommendations to use sidecar containers. Maybe 7 years ago it look like a new trend in distributed systems development (let's remember first Istio implementation on sidecars), but it was not.

You should clearly understand when and why sidecars are applicable. Additional containers add extra resource consumption, complexity and maintenance overhead. In most cases, it's cheaper to implement required features inside a main application.

To summarize, the book suites well for junior and mid-level developers to get basic understanding of cloud architecture patterns. But for senior developers, techleads and architects it will be definitely boring 🥱 .

#booknook #systemdesign #patterns