Distributed Systems Field Guide

An interactive, interview-focused course on distributed systems. Seven real-world systems dissected through 20 reusable design patterns.

Read the course

What's inside

Part 1: System case studies

System	Category	Key trade-off
Dynamo	Key-value store	Sacrifices consistency for availability
Cassandra	Wide-column NoSQL	Tunable consistency with decentralized design
BigTable	Wide-column NoSQL	Strong consistency with centralized coordination
Kafka	Messaging & streaming	Durability and throughput over low latency
GFS	Distributed file system	Optimized for large sequential reads/writes
HDFS	Distributed file system	Open-source GFS for batch processing
Chubby	Coordination service	Strong consistency for small metadata

Each system is covered end-to-end: the problem it solves, architecture, read/write paths, failure handling, and trade-offs.

Part 2: Design patterns

20 reusable patterns that appear across every distributed system:

• Data distribution: Consistent Hashing, Quorum
• Replication: Leader and Follower, High-Water Mark
• Durability: Write-ahead Log, Segmented Log, Checksum
• Failure detection: Heartbeat, Gossip Protocol, Phi Accrual Failure Detection
• Consistency: Vector Clocks, CAP Theorem, PACELC Theorem
• Anti-entropy: Hinted Handoff, Read Repair, Merkle Trees
• Coordination: Lease, Split-brain, Fencing, Bloom Filters

Every pattern links to the systems that use it. Every system links back to the patterns it relies on.

What makes this different

• Interview angles in every chapter with practical system design advice
• Cross-references connecting systems to patterns and patterns to systems
• Comparison tables for trade-offs, architecture decisions, and failure modes
• Quick reference cards on every summary page
• Systems at a Glance page comparing all 7 systems across 12 dimensions

Local development

pnpm install
pnpm start

Opens a local dev server at http://localhost:3000. Changes are reflected live.

Build

pnpm build

Generates static files in the build directory.

Deployment

Deployed automatically to GitHub Pages via GitHub Actions on push to main.

Built with

• Docusaurus for the documentation framework
• KaTeX for math rendering