Lecture 1: Introduction
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as the standard free course for learning distributed systems from real papers.
What it is
The opening lecture of MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems (Spring 2020), introducing the course and core challenges of distributed systems. It begins a playlist that goes on to cover Raft and other consensus papers in Go.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends taude · 2020-12 · on “Raft Visualization”
MIT online trainig has this great YouTube playlist on distributed systems, with one of the lectures being on RAFT [1,2,3]. The entire playlist [4] is probably worth your time, though. [1] Intro [LINK] [2] Part I: [LINK] [3] Part II [LINK] [4] Playlist for the course: [this video]
Recommends yes_but_no · 2021-02 · on “Ask HN: Recommended books and papers on distributed systems?”
Not a book nor a paper, but MIT has published their recent Distr. Systems lectures[0] on youtube. Haven't finished it yet but it touches on papers that stood the test of times. [0] [this video]
Recommends uyt · 2021-06 · on “Stanford CS Curriculum 2021”
Not from stanford but I enjoyed these: MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems [this video] CMU The Databaseology Lectures [LINK] You essentially learn systems by looking at lots and lots of examples of how good real world systems are designed.
Recommends avinassh · 2023-04 · on “Ask HN: What's the best textbook or video lectures on a topic you've come seen?”
Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [LINK] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [this video] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - [LINK] Crafting Interpreters - [LINK] > What made it so special these break down really complex topics and make the concepts approachable. As a noob, I learned a lot from these.
Recommends avinassh · 2023-08 · on “Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?”
Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [LINK] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [this video] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - [LINK] Crafting Interpreters - [LINK]
Recommends bigmutant · 2025-02 · on “Distributed systems programming has stalled”
Good resources for understanding Distributed Systems: - MIT course with Robert Morris (of Morris Worm fame): [this video] - Martin Kleppmann (author of DDIA): [LINK] If you can work through the above (and DDIA), you'll have a solid understanding of the issues in Distributed System, like Consensus, Causality, Split Brain, etc. You'll also gain a critical eye of Cloud Services and be able to articulate their drawbacks (ex: did you know that replication to DynamoDB Secondary Indexes is eventually consistent? What effects can that have on your applications?)
Cites whbrown · 2020-11 · on “Java is better than C++ for high speed trading systems”
Web backend work at scale is all about building and maintaining distributed systems. Just consider the company where Go was designed ... And indeed, it's still a language of choice for teaching systems design[1]. [1] MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems - [this video]