Foundations of Scalable Systems

Description

In many systems, scalability becomes the primary driver as the user base grows. Attractive features and high utility breed success, which brings more requests to handle and more data to manage. But organizations reach a tipping point when design decisions that made sense under light loads suddenly become technical debt. This practical book covers design approaches and technologies that make it possible to scale an application quickly and cost-effectively. Author Ian Gorton takes software architects and developers through the principles of foundational distributed systems. You'll explore the essential ingredients of scalable solutions, including replication, state management, load balancing, and caching. Specific chapters focus on the implications of scalability for databases, microservices, and event-based streaming systems. You'll focus on: Foundations of scalable systems: Learn basic design principles of scalability, its costs, and architectural tradeoffs Designing scalable services: Dive into service design, caching, asynchronous messaging, serverless processing, and microservices Designing scalable data systems: Learn data system fundamentals, NoSQL databases, and eventual consistency versus strong consistency Designing scalable streaming systems: Explore stream processing systems and scalable event-driven processing Preface Why Scalability? Who This Book Is For What You Will Learn I. Scalability in Modern Software Systems 1. Introduction to Scalable Systems What is Scalability? System scale in early 2020’s: Examples How Did We Get Here? A Brief History of System Growth Scalability Basic Design Principles Scalability and Costs Scalability and Architecture Trade-offs Performance Availability Security Manageability Summary and Further Reading References 2. Distributed Systems Architectures: An Introduction Basic System Architecture Scale Out Scaling the Database with Caching Distributing the Database Multiple Processing Tiers Increasing Responsiveness Systems and Hardware Scalability Summary and Further Reading 3. Distributed Systems Essentials Communications Basics Communications Hardware Communications Software Remote Method Invocation Partial Failures Consensus in Distributed Systems Time in Distributed Systems Summary and Further Reading 4. An Overview of Concurrent Systems Why Concurrency? Threads Order of Thread Execution Problems with Threads Race Conditions Deadlocks Thread States Thread Coordination Thread Pools Barrier Synchronization Thread-Safe Collections Summary and Further Reading 5. Application Services Service Design Application Programming Interface (API) Designing Services State Management Applications Servers Horizontal Scaling Load Balancing Load Distribution Policies Health Monitoring Elasticity Session Affinity Summary and Further Reading 6. Distributed Caching Application Caching Web Caching Cache-Control Expires and Last-Modified Etag Summary and Further Reading 7. Asynchronous Messaging Introduction to Messaging Messaging Primitives Message Persistence Publish-Subscribe Message Replication Example: RabbitMQ Messages, Exchanges, and Queues Distribution and Concurrency Data Safety and Performance Trade-offs Availability and Performance Trade-offs Messaging Patterns Competing Consumers Exactly-Once Processing Poison Messages Summary and Further Reading 8. Serverless Processing Systems The Attractions of Serverless Google App Engine The Basics GAE Standard Environment AutoScaling AWS Lambda Lambda Function Lifecycle Execution Considerations Scalability Case Study: Balancing Throughput and Costs Choosing Parameter Values GAE Autoscaling Parameter Study Design Results Summary and Further Reading About the Author