Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design

Decades of distributed systems development have taught us many lessons. In this module we'll cover many historical mistakes as well as proven best practices for scalable and robust design.

Topics include:

• 8 fallacies of distributed systems
• Transactions

Loose coupling has become the watchword of complex systems development, yet few understand its multiple dimensions. In the module we'll be covering the three different dimensions of coupling as well as patterns for dealing with them.

Topics include:

• Platform Coupling
• XML/SOAPTemporal Coupling
• Synchronous/Asynchronous Spatial Coupling
• Endpoints/Topics

Although scalability is achieved through the use of asynchronous message passing, more advanced message exchange patterns are required to handle today's complex integration scenarios. This module will cover the most commonly used patterns:

• One way
• Correlated Request/Response
• Publish/Subscribe

Enterprise Service Buses are all the rage these days. In this module we'll be covering what's the difference between the Bus architectural style, and the more well-known Broker, found commonly in many EAI projects. Topics will include:

• Architectural advantages and disadvantages
• Technological advantages and disadvantages

One of the goals of SOA is to develop systems which are more closely aligned with Business. In this module we'll be covering an analysis methodology from moving from the business domain to executable systems that comply with all the principles of loose-coupling.

• Business Services
• Business Components
• Autonomous components & Queues

Drilling inside Business Services and Business Components, the topic of Command/Query Responsibility Segregation is introduced for designing collaborative, high-scale systems with great user experience. The connection between capturing user intent in task-based UIs, caching, and one-way messaging is described.

Topics include:

• Search & Queries + Denormalization
• Validation & Business Logic for commands
• Publish/Subscribe eventing for synchronizing denormalized caches

In order to enable agility, services must be able to scale up, out, and down quickly. In this module we'll see how queues simplify monitoring solutions while at the same time connecting them to service-level agreements, as well as how this architecture can be capitalize on the capabilities of the cloud in order to create self-tuning systems.

• Scaling heterogeneous server farms
• Monitoring queues for SLA
• Rolling deployment and versioning

The distributed communications patterns wouldn't be complete without a discussion on orchestration. In this module we'll see how to manage the state of long-running distributed communication flows as well as:

• Encapsulating process logic
• Advantages & disadvantages of orchestration
• The connection of time and messaging

Logic-rich services require the use of advanced techniques for logic componentization. The Domain Model Pattern enforces a high level of Separation of Concerns, yet it must eventually be connected with Service Layer code that supports many concurrent users. In this module, the topics covered will include:

• Business Logic inside and outside a Domain Model
• Transactions, Isolation Levels, Concurrency Models
• Testing Domain Models

As more web apps are put under the pressure of growing user bases, performing more complex tasks upon larger quantities of data, standard caching techniques are not able to handle the task by themselves. In this module, students will learn how to leverage the entire web as a cache, use Content Delivery Networks, in combination with the messaging shown in previous modules:

• Composability & Cacheability of dynamic content
• Scalable personalized data
• Integrated messaging & pub/sub for caching sensitive data

In order to make sure that attendees are able to put into practice all that they've learned throughout the course, here we strengthen the seams between the various topics. Q&A is also a core part of this final section.