What we talk about when we talk about distributed systems

Distributed systems are a complex topic. There's abundant research about it but sometimes it is hard for a beginner to know where to start. Alvaro would like to outline the main concepts of distributed systems, so the interested person can have a clear path on how to start their research as well. In this talk, the speaker will review the different models: asynchronous vs. synchronous distributed systems; message passing vs shared memory communication; failure detectors and leader election problems; consensus and different kinds of replication.

Alvaro will also review a series of books on distributed systems to recommend the best one according to the topics we would like to learn about, or the problems we would like to solve. The goal of the talk is to set a good foundation for people interested in learning more about distributed systems.

Talk objectives: When learning about Distributed Systems there are a lot of books and papers to chose from, with many of them having titles that are hard to understand. It's difficult then to judge their relevance to our interests if we don't know the topic already. The goal of the talk is to lay a common ground for Distributed Systems so everyone can benefit from the current research on the topic.

Target audience: engineers interested in getting started with distributed systems.