Systems Architecture & Distributed Systems Topics
Large-scale distributed system design, service architecture, microservices patterns, global distribution strategies, scalability, and fault tolerance at the service/application layer. Covers microservices decomposition, caching strategies, API design, eventual consistency, multi-region systems, and architectural resilience patterns. Excludes storage and database optimization (see Database Engineering & Data Systems), data pipeline infrastructure (see Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure), and infrastructure platform design (see Cloud & Infrastructure).
Consensus and Coordination Algorithms
How independent nodes agree on shared state: Paxos and Raft, leader election, quorum reads and writes, distributed locks, and coordination services such as ZooKeeper or etcd. Covers split-brain avoidance, fencing tokens, and the cost of coordination on throughput and latency. Frames when consensus is required versus when it can be designed away.
Payment and Transaction Processing Systems
Designing systems that move money correctly: idempotent payment flows, exactly-once semantics, reconciliation, ledgers, double-entry accounting, and fraud-detection architecture. Covers handling retries and partial failures without double-charging, and the consistency guarantees payments demand. A high-stakes specialization of distributed transactions.
Distributed Systems Security and Trust
Securing communication and trust across a distributed system: service-to-service authentication and authorization, mutual TLS, zero-trust boundaries, secrets management, and multi-party protocols and distributed trust models. Covers securing data in transit and at rest across service boundaries and isolating tenant and network zones. The security-architecture concerns specific to distributed designs.