Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems

This book describes the key concepts, principles and implementation options for creating high-assurance cloud computing solutions. The guide starts with a broad technical overview and basic introduction to cloud computing, looking at the overall architecture of the cloud, client systems, the modern Internet and cloud computing data centers. It then delves into the core challenges of showing how reliability and fault-tolerance can be abstracted, how the resulting questions can be solved, and how the solutions can be leveraged to create a wide range of practical cloud applications. The author’s style is practical, and the guide should be readily understandable without any special background. Concrete examples are often drawn from real-world settings to illustrate key insights. Appendices show how the most important reliability models can be formalized, describe the API of the Isis² platform, and offer more than 80 problems at varying levels of difficulty.

Dr. Kenneth P. Birman is an ACM Fellow and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University.  He received the 2009 IEEE Tsukomo Kanai Award for his fundamental and practical contributions to distributed computing, fault tolerance, reliability and distributed systems management, and has authored nearly 200 journal and conference papers in the area.  Examples of settings in which his work has been applied include the communications infrastructure of the NYSE, the Swiss Stock Exchange, the US Navy's AEGIS warship, the French air-traffic control system, and a wide range of cutting edge cloud-computing products.