Chapter 1. Designing in a Distributed World

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

—C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

How does Google Search work? How does your Facebook Timeline stay updated around the clock? How does Amazon scan an ever-growing catalog of items to tell you that people who bought this item also bought socks?

Is it magic? No, it’s distributed computing.

This chapter is an overview of what is involved in designing services that use distributed computing techniques. These are the techniques all large web sites use to achieve their size, scale, ...

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