Course readings

All the readings for this course will be articles for professional programmers and system designers. Most of them have been published in magazines written for a general computing audience, such as Communications of the ACM and IEEE Computer. A few will come from conferences and blog posts.

To read a linked article or book

• Click on the link
• If you are not on the SFU network, you may be asked to enter your SFU email id and password.
• If the link is to a blog, you can just read the post

• If the link is to an article or book, you will see a page giving one or more options:

  • Some articles (including all the ones from ACM) will be readable directly as HTML or downloaded as PDF
  • Other articles are only available as PDF

Caution

Please do not repost the copyrighted entries somewhere else. Downloading the articles from the original sites allows the author and publisher to track the downlaod count. This rewards the author and encourages the publisher to accept more articles on that topic.

Bibliography

Readings will be taken from the following list (click on the column title to sort by that column):

Bibliography

Title	Type	Topic
A Guided Tour of Data-center Networking	Article	Datacenter
AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started	Post	AWS
boto: A Python Interface to Amazon Web Services	Documentation	AWS
AWS SDK for Java API Reference	Documentation	AWS
Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain	Reference	Learning
A View of Cloud Computing	Article	Business
Eventual Consistency Today	Article	CAP
PBS: Probabilistically Bounded Staleness (with interactive demonstration)	Reference	CAP
Deliberate Git	Post	Tools
The Datacenter as a Computer, 2d. Ed.	Book	Datacenter
Riak Technical Overview	Documentation	Database
Riak Database	Software	Database
The Absolutely Simplest Consistent Hashing Example	Post	Database
Lessons from giant-scale services	Article	Scalability
CAP Twelve Years Later	Article	CAP
There Is No Getting Around It: You Are Building a Distributed System	Article	App-design
Redis Key-Value Store	Software	Database
OSv: The Open Source Cloud Operating System That is Not Linux	Post	Platform
Adrian Cockcroft	Blog	Performance
Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database	Article	CAP
How to Save 90% on Your S3 Bill	Post	AWS
Data Center Knowledge	Blog	Datacenter
The Tail at Scale	Article	Latency
Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store	Article	CAP
Cloud---Dr. Dobb's	Blog	Tools
Pynamo: Exploring the Dynamo Paper in Python	Post	CAP
Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free	Article	Business
The "Four Hamiltons" Framework for Mitigating Faults in the Cloud: Avoid It, Mask It, Bound It, Fix It Fast	Post	Operations
Eucalyptus: Open Source AWS Compatible Private Clouds	Software	Cloud
Software Reigns in Microsoft's Cloud-Scale Data Centers	Post	Datacenter
Microsoft Cloud-Scale Data Center Designs	Post	Datacenter
Perspectives on the CAP Theorem	Article	CAP
Google Data Centers	Post	Datacenter
Explore a Google Data Center With Street View	Post	Datacenter
Google Container Data Center Tour	Post	Datacenter
VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network	Article	Network
Thinking Methodically About Performance	Article	Performance
You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance	Post	CAP
On Designing and Deploying Internet-scale Services	Article	Operations
The Power Failure Seen Around the World	Post	Operations
Lazy logging calls in Python	Post	Operations
Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition	Article	Distributed
Condos and clouds	Article	App-design
0MQ---The Guide	Documentation	Messaging
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods	Post	Distributed
Log Everything All the Time	Post	Operations
20 Obstacles to Scalability	Article	Scalability
0MQ	Software	Messaging
The Essence of Software Engineering: The SEMAT Kernel	Article	Process
Alpha State Cards	Post	Process
Distributed Algorithms in NoSQL Databases	Article	CAP
Google Finds: Centralized Control, Distributed Data Architectures Work Better Than Fully Decentralized Architectures	Post	CAP
Highly Scalable Blog	Blog	Scalability
Weathering the Unexpected	Article	Operations
Toward Software-Defined SLAs	Article	SLA
CloudCmp: Comparing Public Cloud Providers	Article	Performance
loggly	Software	Operations
logstash	Software	Operations
Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System	Article	Platform
How to Beat the CAP Theorem	Post	CAP
Logbook source code	Software	Operations
Cloud Design Patterns Now Available	Post	App-design
The Netflix Tech Blog	Blog	Cloud
Netflix Open Source Software Centre	Software	Cloud
New Relic	Software	Operations
Pantheios	Software	Operations
reindent.py	Software	Tools
Princeton Alumni Weekly Special Issue on Privacy	Issue	Privacy
VL2: Technical Perspective	Article	Network
Adopting DevOps practices in quality assurance	Article	Operations
Rollbar	Software	Operations
Logbook 0.6.0	Software	Operations
The Rise of DevOps	Post	Operations
AWS Tips, Tricks, and Techniques	Post	AWS
Thoughts on Scalability	Post	Scalability
Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know (By Year)	Reference	Latency
Broken by Design: MongoDB Fault Tolerance	Post	Database
F1: A Distributed Database that Scales	Article	Database
SPUNKI: A Reading Rubric That Engages Students With Course Content	Reference	Learning
Heroku's Ugly Secret	Post	Platform
Distributed systems for fun and profit	Book	Distributed
Replicated Data Consistency Explained Through Baseball	Article	CAP
The Antifragile Organization	Article	Operations
Eventual Consistency	Article	CAP
Git Workflow, or, How to Use Git and Prosper	Post	Tools
S3mper: Consistency in the Cloud	Post	CAP
Consistent Hashing	Post	Database