Think Distributed Systems you own this product

Dominik Tornow
  • MEAP began June 2024
  • Publication in Fall 2025 (estimated)
  • ISBN 9781633436176
  • 275 pages (estimated)
  • printed in black & white

pro $24.99 per month

  • access to all Manning books, MEAPs, liveVideos, liveProjects, and audiobooks!
  • choose one free eBook per month to keep
  • exclusive 50% discount on all purchases

lite $19.99 per month

  • access to all Manning books, including MEAPs!

team

5, 10 or 20 seats+ for your team - learn more


Look inside
Reason confidently about distributed systems.

All modern software is distributed. Let’s say that again—all modern software is distributed. Whether you’re building mobile utilities, microservices, or massive cloud native enterprise applications, creating efficient distributed systems requires you to think differently about failure, performance, network services, resource usage, latency, and much more. This clearly-written book guides you into the mindset you’ll need to design, develop, and deploy scalable and reliable distributed systems.

In Think Distributed Systems you’ll find a beautifully illustrated collection of mental models for:

  • Correctness, scalability, and reliability
  • Failure tolerance, detection, and mitigation
  • Message processing
  • Partitioning and replication
  • Consensus

Distributed systems can be complex and challenging to understand. You’ll love how the insightful analogies, practical examples, helpful illustrations, and accurate definitions illuminate even the most difficult topics. Think Distributed Systems breaks down this wide-ranging topic into clear categories like transactions, message processing, and distributed consensus. In every chapter, you’ll find a new “aha!” moment.

about the book

Think Distributed Systems provides accurate and concise mental models to help you reason confidently about distributed systems. It delivers a big picture view of distributed systems along with a detailed look at key topics like partitioning, replication, durable executions, and consensus protocols. You’ll learn how to handle component and network failures as you develop both the skills and the intuition to design, implement, and understand the most common types of distributed systems you’ll encounter.

about the reader

For software engineers and architects.

about the author

Dominik Tornow is the founder and CEO of Resonate HQ, Inc. He studied software systems engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany and has over 20 years of industry experience. Dominik specializes in systems modeling, focusing on formal and conceptual modeling to ensure that concurrent, distributed systems are correct by construction.

There was a lot more practical knowledge here that I couldn't find in any other books.

Ajay Thakur

Good read for junior engineers diving into distributed systems.

Prit Sheth

This book provides an excellent overview which should motivate the readers to dive deep into the details by reading technical papers and experimenting with open-source code for various components.

Bhavin Thaker

choose your plan

team

monthly
annual
$49.99
$499.99
only $41.67 per month
  • five seats for your team
  • access to all Manning books, MEAPs, liveVideos, liveProjects, and audiobooks!
  • choose another free product every time you renew
  • choose twelve free products per year
  • exclusive 50% discount on all purchases
  • Think Distributed Systems ebook for free

choose your plan

team

monthly
annual
$49.99
$499.99
only $41.67 per month
  • five seats for your team
  • access to all Manning books, MEAPs, liveVideos, liveProjects, and audiobooks!
  • choose another free product every time you renew
  • choose twelve free products per year
  • exclusive 50% discount on all purchases
  • Think Distributed Systems ebook for free