Distributed Systems in One Lesson by Tim Berglund

Tim Berglund explains the core concepts of distributed systems, including storage, computation, messaging, and consensus, using a coffee shop analogy.

Normally simple tasks like running a program or storing and retrieving data become much more complicated when we start to do them on collections of computers, rather than single machines. Distributed systems has become a key architectural concern, and affects everything a program would normally do—giving us enormous power, but at the cost of increased complexity as well. Using a series of examples all set in a coffee shop, we’ll explore topics like distributed storage, computation, timing, messaging, and consensus. You'll leave with a good grasp of each of these problems, and a solid understanding of the ecosystem of open-source tools in the space.