5 ms·

Distributed Systems: A free online class

138 points by roperzh 6y ago

Tectorial 6y ago
Can somebody vote for the quality of this course?
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  Better reread Aphyr.
- jand 6y ago
  Just because you asked "vote" and not "vouch": I expected to somewhere find at least a reference to the "fallacies of distributed computing" [1]. Looked into topic "how systems fail - what could go wrong". Was surprised by the unstructured approach of a) (in the video) rambling down a list of personally encountered errors and b) (on the slides) presenting a messy picture containing the items of said list. Together with the fact that the slides seem to have had no real update since 2016, i consider myself not part of the target audience and would not recommend this online class. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...
  - shortlived 6y ago
    > presenting a messy picture containing the items of said list. It felt like a way to show the chaos factor in failures.
snidane 6y ago
Btw. there is a Distributed Systems lecture series by MIT from Spring 2020. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbsvGQk9_UB https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs...
- lynxaegon 6y ago
  Oh! Thank you for this one. I was really searching for something like this from MIT :)
- ashishmax31 6y ago
  Thank you so much. I don't see many of these courses listed on youtube in their official mit ocw website. I wonder why..
- pragnesh 6y ago
  Two more Distributed course link available on youtube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNPUF5QyWU8O0Wd8QDh9KaM1ggsxspJ31 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNPUF5QyWU8O0Wd8QDh9K... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_HdUFe97RItdiB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_H...
- roperzh 6y ago
  yes! thank you for sharing! I have found this link after posting, and it's great. Another promising resource I've found is Martin Kleppmann's "Distributed Systems Lecture Series" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_HdUFe97RItdiB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_H...
- gsserge 6y ago
  Here's the actual course's link with lecture materials and labs: http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2020/schedule.html http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2020/schedule.html
- ignoramous 6y ago
  And AWS' Builders Library: https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/
aabbcc1241 6y ago
a clear showcase of purecss
yelgrass 6y ago
Cool. I can learn something from this for my industrial automation job.
sdht0 6y ago
The High Scalability blog [0] complements such courses nicely with curated lists of real world distributed systems and practices. I also found this reading list [1] a great reference. [0] http://highscalability.com http://highscalability.com [1] https://www.the-paper-trail.org/post/2014-08-09-distributed-systems-theory-for-the-distributed-systems-engineer https://www.the-paper-trail.org/post/2014-08-09-distributed-...
sershe 6y ago
As a long-time distributed systems developer, I actually wonder... is there going to be a lot of distributed systems development going forward? 1) A lot of the stuff that needed to be developed has been developed and generalized (and to a large extent centralized by cloud providers). It feels almost like web apps going from large teams writing complex LAMP projects from scratch (I remember writing hand-made XHR when prototype.js was an advanced JS library ;) to one person throwing something together in a week with feature-rich libraries and ready-made parts. 2) The trend (both present and future, e.g. TCP over NVMe, cheap massive SSDs, flash memory) is that many tasks that used to require state-of-the-art code, many coordinated machines, clever hackery to work around the slowness of the disk reads, etc. can now be easily done on one machine with simple code. Sure, there are exceptions (some types of ML tasks? specialized scientific/HFT/... workloads?), but I feel like the hardware capabilities are currently growing faster than the need to process more data, faster. To be fair I also felt kinda like that in 2012 when Hadoop was hot and having SSDs on a server was cutting edge. Maybe I'm just paranoid ;)

138 points by roperzh 6y ago

Tectorial 6y ago

Can somebody vote for the quality of this course?

sam_lowry_ 6y ago
Better reread Aphyr.
jand 6y ago
Just because you asked "vote" and not "vouch": I expected to somewhere find at least a reference to the "fallacies of distributed computing" [1]. Looked into topic "how systems fail - what could go wrong". Was surprised by the unstructured approach of a) (in the video) rambling down a list of personally encountered errors and b) (on the slides) presenting a messy picture containing the items of said list. Together with the fact that the slides seem to have had no real update since 2016, i consider myself not part of the target audience and would not recommend this online class. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...
- shortlived 6y ago
  > presenting a messy picture containing the items of said list. It felt like a way to show the chaos factor in failures.

snidane 6y ago

Btw. there is a Distributed Systems lecture series by MIT from Spring 2020. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbsvGQk9_UB https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs...

lynxaegon 6y ago
Oh! Thank you for this one. I was really searching for something like this from MIT :)
ashishmax31 6y ago
Thank you so much. I don't see many of these courses listed on youtube in their official mit ocw website. I wonder why..
pragnesh 6y ago
Two more Distributed course link available on youtube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNPUF5QyWU8O0Wd8QDh9KaM1ggsxspJ31 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNPUF5QyWU8O0Wd8QDh9K... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_HdUFe97RItdiB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_H...
roperzh 6y ago
yes! thank you for sharing! I have found this link after posting, and it's great. Another promising resource I've found is Martin Kleppmann's "Distributed Systems Lecture Series" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_HdUFe97RItdiB https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_H...
gsserge 6y ago
Here's the actual course's link with lecture materials and labs: http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2020/schedule.html http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2020/schedule.html
ignoramous 6y ago
And AWS' Builders Library: https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/

aabbcc1241 6y ago

a clear showcase of purecss

yelgrass 6y ago

Cool. I can learn something from this for my industrial automation job.

sdht0 6y ago

The High Scalability blog [0] complements such courses nicely with curated lists of real world distributed systems and practices. I also found this reading list [1] a great reference. [0] http://highscalability.com http://highscalability.com [1] https://www.the-paper-trail.org/post/2014-08-09-distributed-systems-theory-for-the-distributed-systems-engineer https://www.the-paper-trail.org/post/2014-08-09-distributed-...

sershe 6y ago

As a long-time distributed systems developer, I actually wonder... is there going to be a lot of distributed systems development going forward? 1) A lot of the stuff that needed to be developed has been developed and generalized (and to a large extent centralized by cloud providers). It feels almost like web apps going from large teams writing complex LAMP projects from scratch (I remember writing hand-made XHR when prototype.js was an advanced JS library ;) to one person throwing something together in a week with feature-rich libraries and ready-made parts. 2) The trend (both present and future, e.g. TCP over NVMe, cheap massive SSDs, flash memory) is that many tasks that used to require state-of-the-art code, many coordinated machines, clever hackery to work around the slowness of the disk reads, etc. can now be easily done on one machine with simple code. Sure, there are exceptions (some types of ML tasks? specialized scientific/HFT/... workloads?), but I feel like the hardware capabilities are currently growing faster than the need to process more data, faster. To be fair I also felt kinda like that in 2012 when Hadoop was hot and having SSDs on a server was cutting edge. Maybe I'm just paranoid ;)