Upgrade to Pro
— share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …
Speaker Deck
Features
Speaker Deck
PRO
Sign in
Sign up for free
Search
Search
Learning to Build Distributed Systems the Hard Way
Search
Theo Hultberg
March 05, 2013
Programming
1
140
Learning to Build Distributed Systems the Hard Way
Scandinavian Developer Conference 2013
Theo Hultberg
March 05, 2013
Tweet
Share
More Decks by Theo Hultberg
See All by Theo Hultberg
Datalakes at AWS Summit Stockholm 2018
iconara
0
95
Building a CQL driver
iconara
0
59
Chasing the Elephant
iconara
0
92
Learning to Build Distributed Systems the Hard Way
iconara
2
210
Learning to Build Distributed Systems the Hard Way
iconara
3
5.1k
Concurrency and Distributed Systems in JRuby
iconara
3
660
A Guide to the Post Relational Revolution
iconara
4
5.4k
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants with JRuby
iconara
4
160
Shortcuts Around the Mistakes I've Made Scaling MongoDB
iconara
4
170
Other Decks in Programming
See All in Programming
alien-signals と自作 OSS で実現する フレームワーク非依存な ロジック共通化の探求 / Exploring Framework-Agnostic Logic Sharing with alien-signals and Custom OSS
aoseyuu
3
5.3k
Towards Transactional Buffering of CDC Events @ Flink Forward 2025 Barcelona Spain
hpgrahsl
0
120
Reactive Thinking with Signals and the Resource API
manfredsteyer
PRO
0
120
O Que É e Como Funciona o PHP-FPM?
marcelgsantos
0
240
contribution to astral-sh/uv
shunsock
0
570
三者三様 宣言的UI
kkagurazaka
0
330
AI Agent 時代的開發者生存指南
eddie
4
2.2k
CSC305 Lecture 10
javiergs
PRO
0
330
AI駆動開発カンファレンスAutumn2025 _AI駆動開発にはAI駆動品質保証
autifyhq
0
110
Dive into Triton Internals
appleparan
0
380
開発組織の戦略的な役割と 設計スキル向上の効果
masuda220
PRO
10
2k
ボトムアップの生成AI活用を推進する社内AIエージェント開発
aku11i
0
1.4k
Featured
See All Featured
Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices
caitiem20
333
22k
Refactoring Trust on Your Teams (GOTO; Chicago 2020)
rmw
35
3.2k
jQuery: Nuts, Bolts and Bling
dougneiner
65
7.9k
[Rails World 2023 - Day 1 Closing Keynote] - The Magic of Rails
eileencodes
37
2.6k
Scaling GitHub
holman
463
140k
Performance Is Good for Brains [We Love Speed 2024]
tammyeverts
12
1.2k
Designing Dashboards & Data Visualisations in Web Apps
destraynor
231
54k
How Fast Is Fast Enough? [PerfNow 2025]
tammyeverts
2
220
Measuring & Analyzing Core Web Vitals
bluesmoon
9
650
The Psychology of Web Performance [Beyond Tellerrand 2023]
tammyeverts
49
3.1k
ReactJS: Keep Simple. Everything can be a component!
pedronauck
666
130k
Sharpening the Axe: The Primacy of Toolmaking
bcantrill
46
2.5k
Transcript
LEARNING TO BUILD DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS THE HARD WAY @iconara NEW
and improved!
LEARNING TO BUILD DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS THE HARD WAY @iconara NEW
and improved!
speakerdeck.com/iconara
Theo / @iconara
chief architect at BURT
FAILURE embrace it
SCALE how hard can it be? let’s worry about that
later.
KNOW YOUR LIMITS who’s the largest customer you could sign?
what would happen if you did?
BALANCE “customer” is a really bad shard key, find something
that distributes evenly & uniformly
SCALE OUT, NOT UP bigger boxes aren’t going to save
you <
START WITH TWO OF EVERYTHING going from one to two
is the hardest, force yourself to solve the scaling problem up front
START WITH TWO OF EVERYTHING you’ll solve the scaling problem,
and need less overcapacity THREE
LIMITS we’ll probably never run out of memory
BACK PRESSURE what happens when the system is working at
full capacity? what happens next?
PRODUCTION = QA production is where the weird shit happens,
can you test production traffic without deploying to production? =
MONOLITHS running all the things on the same box is
really fast. what could ever go wrong? 1:4:9
DECOUPLE UNTIL IT BREAKS moving things to separate services means
that you will be able to scale them independently
PROCESSING & STORAGE separate processing from storage, they almost never
scale together.
SCALE exponential scaling is also scaling, but you want it
as cheaply as possible
SCALE your CFO may not agree that O(2n) = O(n)
GÖTEBORG, DISTRIBUTED @gbgdistr meetup.com/gbgdistributed
KTHXBAI @iconara github.com/iconara architecturalatrocities.com burtcorp.com