Distributed Systems lecture series by Martin Kleppmann
A full Cambridge undergraduate distributed systems course, recorded and free, covering logical clocks, broadcast, replication and consensus with actual rigour. Free university material of this quality is rare.
Video
System Design
University of Cambridge
8 lectures, about 8 hours
Advanced
Free
What it is
Eight recorded lectures from a Cambridge course, taught by the author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, with accompanying lecture notes and exercises.
Why it is worth the time
Most freely available distributed systems content is either marketing or interview preparation. This is a real course, with proofs where proofs are warranted, covering the models and impossibility results that explain why distributed systems are hard rather than just asserting that they are.
The topics that pay off
Logical and vector clocks, broadcast ordering, replication and quorums, and the consensus material. After these, discussions of eventual consistency and linearisability stop being vocabulary and start being distinctions you can reason with.
How to use it
Watch with the notes open and do the exercises. It is a course, and treating it as a video series produces the usual result of remembering nothing.
Best for: engineers who want the theory, and anyone whose distributed systems knowledge came entirely from blog posts.
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