Distributed Systems Foundations
Core mental models for coordination, failure, time, load, contracts, and operational trade-offs in distributed systems.
Distributed Cloud And Networked Systems
TRACKS
Event-Driven Architecture and Streaming Foundations
Application-level event-driven design: event boundaries, broker models, delivery semantics, contracts, idempotency, replay, backpressure, and operational review. This track is the bridge into deeper messaging internals, stream processing, CDC, and distributed workflow tracks.
Cloud Platform and Microservices
Service decomposition, gateways, meshes, orchestration, and platform control surfaces.
Networking and Failure Models
Network layers, protocol boundaries, retries, and the failure models they create.
Gossip, Membership, and Epidemic Systems
Probabilistic dissemination, failure evidence, membership lifecycles, resilient overlays, epidemic repair, and production design for large changing clusters.
Consensus and Coordination
Consensus safety and liveness, Paxos, Raft, ZAB, quorum and commit evidence, replicated state machines, safe reads, reconfiguration, coordination APIs, operations, and failure verification.
Consistency and Replication
Replication models, quorums, isolation, ordering, and large-scale coordination trade-offs.
Distributed Transactions and Sagas
Atomicity boundaries, sagas, idempotency, outbox patterns, and the trade-offs between coordination and compensation in distributed workflows.
Distributed Schedulers and Control Planes
Reconcilers, leases, scheduling, placement, autoscaling, and control-plane design patterns.
CRDTs and Coordination Avoidance
Mergeable data types, invariant design, monotonicity, and the techniques that reduce coordination in replicated systems.
Geo-Distributed Systems and Disaster Tolerance
Regional topology, failover control, latency trade-offs, disaster tolerance, and the architecture of systems stretched across failure domains.
Distributed Messaging and Queue Internals
Log brokers, consumer coordination, delivery semantics, retention, and the internals of queue and streaming substrates.
Distributed Testing, Simulation, and Deterministic Replay
Fault injection, schedule control, simulation harnesses, trace replay, and the testing strategies used to make distributed bugs reproducible.
Network Protocols and Transport Systems
Internet protocol mechanics from link layer and IP through TCP congestion algorithms, routing, middleboxes, measurement, secure channels, SDN, and datacenter fabrics.
HTTP Protocol and Content Delivery
HTTP semantics, representation contracts, browser credential boundaries, caching, HTTPS delivery, proxies, DNS, CDNs, long-lived connections, and observability for backend-facing web delivery.
Distributed Systems Protocols and Labs
Implementation-centered distributed systems practice: RPC, MapReduce, clocks, snapshots, DHTs, replication, Raft, Spanner-style transactions, and key-value services.
Containers, Kubernetes, and Platform Runtime
Container runtime mechanics, image delivery, Kubernetes workload primitives, networking, storage, autoscaling, PDBs, service mesh sidecars, security profiles, and platform operations for backend services.
API Protocols, RPC, and Edge Contracts
Advanced API protocol mechanics for backend systems: HTTP/2, HTTP/3, TLS 1.3, gRPC streams, GraphQL execution, gateway policy, binary encodings, and contract evolution.
Infrastructure as Code and Cloud Automation
Terraform-style infrastructure workflows: desired state, state files, modules, drift, policy gates, CI/CD, GitOps, cost controls, and rebuildable cloud environments.