How to design and verify distributed systems?

Question

I've been working on a project, which is a combination of an application server and an object database, and is currently running on a single machine only. Some time ago I read a paper which describes a distributed relational database, and got some ideas on how to apply the ideas in that paper to my project, so that I could make a high-availability version of it running on a cluster using a shared-nothing architecture.

My problem is, that I don't have experience on designing distributed systems and their protocols - I did not take the advanced CS courses about distributed systems at university. So I'm worried about being able to design a protocol, which does not cause deadlock, starvation, split brain and other problems.

Question: Where can I find good material about designing distributed systems? What methods there are for verifying that a distributed protocol works right? Recommendations of books, academic articles and others are welcome.

Answer 1

I learned a lot by looking at what is published about really huge web-based plattforms, and especially how their systems evolved over time to meet their growth.

Here a some examples I found enlightening:

• eBay Architecture: Nice history of their architecture and the issues they had. Obviously they can't use a lot of caching for the auctions and bids, so their story is different in that point from many others. As of 2006, they deployed 100,000 new lines of code every two weeks - and are able to roll back an ongoing deployment if issues arise.

• Paper on Google File System: Nice analysis of what they needed, how they implemented it and how it performs in production use. After reading this, I found it less scary to build parts of the infrastructure myself to meet exactly my needs, if necessary, and that such a solution can and probably should be quite simple and straight-forward. There is also a lot of interesting stuff on the net (including YouTube videos) on BigTable and MapReduce, other important parts of Google's architecture.

• Inside MySpace: One of the few really huge sites build on the Microsoft stack. You can learn a lot of what not to do with your data layer.

A great start for finding much more resources on this topic is the Real Life Architectures section on the "High Scalability" web site. For example they a good summary on Amazons architecture.