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Designing Distributed Systems book

Patterns for distributed systems built on containers — sidecar, ambassador, adapter, leader election, work queue.

Brendan Burns · 2018 · systems

Patterns for distributed systems built on containers — sidecar, ambassador, adapter, leader election, work queue.

why it matters

Burns (k8s co-founder) catalogs the patterns that emerged once containers became the deployment unit. Smaller and more specific than Fowler's distributed-systems book — focused on what reusable container-shaped patterns look like in practice.

key ideas

  • Single-node patterns: sidecar (extending behavior), ambassador (proxying), adapter (homogenizing interfaces)
  • Replicated single-server, sharded services, scatter-gather as canonical multi-node patterns
  • Asynchronous job processing, work queues, event-driven processing as separable building blocks
  • Patterns are container-shaped: each is a deployment unit, composable

who should read it

Engineers building on Kubernetes or container-orchestration platforms. Short and pragmatic.

covers

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