Hi, Is learning about distributed systems still a good career path or are we better off becoming a full-stack or ML engineer? Please share more details in comments.
Distributed systems is here to stay forever. Things like ML, IOT, Blockchain may or may not be as popular in future as they are now.
Distributed system will be a fundamental skill like git
System design interviews still ask to design distributed systems. When top companies start to ask something else (full stack design, ml, blockchain), then we can talk if distributed systems are obsolete. But this didn't happen yet.
All these areas eventually become distributed systems problems as you scale them up.
What are some good resources to learn Distributed systems? Like the foundational stuffs, not applications.
George Colouris' book, Tanenbaum's latest edition of his DS book, these are some good resources for foundations. I would also say that a good foundation of operating systems and computer networks is also needed to be good at distributed systems. Reading papers from places like Google (eg: GFS, Chubby lock service) are great to see these concepts put into practice in the real world, RFC's of protocols and building small prototypes out of these RFC's and papers in either C++/Go/Java, is a great way to put that learning to practice and see the issues you can face while building such systems.
Thanks for giving a very well thought comment. As a person starting out my career, this is a very valuable advice!
Distributed systems are required therefore having the skills in it is only a plus. It’s needed because distributed systems currently is the best way to scale hundreds of thousands of QPS and segregate concerns, while staying agile. When something better comes along it’ll replace it. Until then..
ML involves a lot of distributed systems
This
In what ways? I know nothing about ML? Do you mean deployment, training infra etc.?
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> distributed systems > solved problem My fucking sides
But it is a solved problem if you use aws / azure / gcp or something like that. Unless you're building your own distributed setup with individual machines and setting up gossip, heartbeat, zookeeper etc into them and doing your own system admin and devops, it's a solved problem. You only need to know how to use them, not how they work.
You’re trying to shoehorn a specific class of distributed computing as a solution to all problems in the distributed systems space, and even those “solutions” suffer greatly from issues involving latency due to proximity, cold starts, and more.