The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable and Maintainable Systems

TL;DR — The opening chapters of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, released free as a sampler.

A publisher’s excerpt of Martin Kleppmann’s Designing Data-Intensive Applications — the chapter that frames the whole book around three properties: reliability, scalability and maintainability, each defined precisely enough to trade off against the others.

DDIA is the rare systems book that is both rigorous and readable, and it became the standard text for backend engineering almost immediately. The free sampler contains the framing that makes the rest coherent.

Where this came from

• Brendan Sheehan’s public are.na channel

70 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.