Learning Distributed Systems (Ep 12)
In this episode of The Podlets Podcast, we welcome Michael Gasch from VMware to join our discussion on the necessity (or not) of formal education in working in the realm of distributed systems. There is a common belief that studying computer science is a must if you want to enter this field, but today we talk about the various ways in which individuals can teach themselves everything they need to know. What we establish, however, is that you need a good dose of curiosity and craziness to find your feet in this world, and we discuss the many different pathways you can take to fully equip yourself. Long gone are the days when you needed a degree from a prestigious school: we give you our hit-list of top resources that will go a long way in helping you succeed in this industry. Whether you are someone who prefers learning by reading, attending Meetups or listening to podcasts, this episode will provide you with lots of new perspectives on learning about distributed systems. Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Duffie Cooley Michael Gasch Key Points From This Episode: • Introducing our new host, Michael Gasch, and a brief overview of his role at VMware. • Duffie and Carlisia’s educational backgrounds and the value of hands-on work experience. • How they first got introduced to distributed systems and the confusion around what it involves. • Why distributed systems are about more than simply streamlining communication and making things work. • The importance and benefit of educating oneself on the fundamentals of this topic. • Our top recommended resources for learning about distributed systems and their concepts. • The practical downside of not having a formal education in software development. • The different ways in which people learn, index and approach problem-solving. • Ensuring that you balance reading with implementation and practical experience. • Why it’s important to expose yourself to discussions on the topic you want to learn about. • The value of getting different perspectives around ideas that you think you understand. • How systems thinking is applicable to things outside of computer science.• The various factors that influence how we build systems. Quotes: “When people are interacting with distributed systems today, or if I were to ask like 50 people what a distributed system is, I would probably get 50 different answers.” — @mauilion [0:14:43] “Try to expose yourself to the words, because our brains are amazing. Once you get exposure, it’s like your brain works in the background. All of a sudden, you go, ‘Oh, yeah! I know this word.’” — @carlisia [0:14:43] “If you’re just curious a little bit and maybe a little bit crazy, you can totally get down the rabbit hole in distributed systems and get totally excited about it. There’s no need for having formal education and the degree to enter this world.” — @embano1 [0:44:08] Learning resources suggested by the hosts: Book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, M. Kleppmann Book, Distributed Systems, M. van Steen and A.S. Tanenbaum (free with registration) Book, Thesis on Raft, D. Ongaro. - Consensus - Bridging Theory and Practice (free PDF) Book, Enterprise Integration Patterns, B.Woolf, G. Hohpe Book, Designing Distributed Systems, B. Burns (free with registration) Video, Distributed Systems Video, Architecting Distributed Cloud Applications Video, Distributed Algorithms Video, Operating System - IIT Lectures Video, Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2018) Video, Advanced Database Systems (Spring 2018) Paper, Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System Post, Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods Post, Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit Post, On Time Post, Distributed Systems @The Morning Paper Post, Distributed Systems @Brave New Geek Post, Aphyr’s Class materials for a distributed systems lecture series Post, The Log - What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction Post, Github - awesome-distributed-systems Post, Your Coffee Shop Doesn’t Use Two-Phase Commit Podcast, Distributed Systems Engineering with Apache Kafka ft. Jason Gustafson Podcast, The Systems Bible - The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large and Small - John Gall Podcast, Systems Programming - Designing and Developing Distributed Applications - Richard Anthony Podcast, Distributed Systems - Design Concepts - Sunil Kumar Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: The Podlets on Twitter — https://twitter.com/thepodlets Michael Gasch on LinkedIn — https://de.linkedin.com/in/michael-gasch-10603298 Michael Gasch on Twitter — https://twitter.com/embano1 Carlisia Campos on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlisia Duffie Cooley on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauilion VMware — https://www.vmware.com/ Kubernetes — https://kubernetes.io/ Linux — https://www.linux.org Brian Grant on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgrant0607 Kafka — https://kafka.apache.org/ Lamport Article — https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/time-clocks.pdf Designing Date-Intensive Applications — https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable-ebook/dp/B06XPJML5D Designing Distributed Systems — https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Distributed-Systems-Patterns-Paradigms/dp/1491983647 Papers We Love Meetup — https://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/ The Systems Bible — https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/dp/0961825170 Enterprise Integration Patterns — https://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Integration-Patterns-Designing-Deploying/dp/0321200683 Transcript: EPISODE 12 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [EPISODE] [00:00:41] CC: Hi, everybody. Welcome back. This is Episode 12, and we are going to talk about distributed systems without a degree or even with a degree, because who knows how much we learn in university. I am Carlisia Campos, one of your hosts. Today, I also have Duffie Cooley. Say hi, Duffie. [00:01:02] DC: Hey, everybody. [00:01:03] CC: And a new host for you, and this is such a treat. Michael Gasch, please tell us a little bit of your background. [00:01:11] MG: Hey! Hey, everyone! Thanks, Carlisia. Yes. So I’m new to the show. I just want to keep it brief because I think over the show we’ll discuss our backgrounds a little bit further. So right now, I’m with VMware. So I’ve been with VMware almost for five years. Currently, I'm in the office of the CTO. I’m a platform architect in the office of the CTO and I mainly use Kubernetes on a daily basis from an engineering perspective. So we build a lot of prototypes based on customer input or ideas that we have, and we work with different engineering teams. Kurbernetes has become kind of my bread and butter but lately more from a consumer perspective like developing with Kurbenetes or against Kubernetes, instead of the formal ware of mostly being around implementing and architecting Kubernetes. [00:01:55] CC: Nice. Very impressive. Duffie? [00:01:58] MG: Thank you. [00:01:59] DC: Yeah. [00:02:00] CC: Let’s give the audience a little bit of your backgrounds. We’ve done this before but just to frame the episodes, so people will know how we come in as distributed systems. [00:02:13] DC: Sure. In my experience, I spent – I don’t have a formal education history. I spent most of my time kind of like in a high school time. Then from there, basically worked into different systems administration, network administration, network architect, and up into virtualization and now containerization. So I’ve got a pretty hands-on kind of bootstrap experience around managing infrastructure, both at small-scale, inside of offices, and the way up to very large scale, working for some of the larger companies here in the Silicon Valley. [00:02:46] CC: All right. My turn I guess. So I do have a computer science degree but I don’t feel that I really went deep at all in distributed systems. My degree is also from a long time ago. So mainly, what I do know now is almost entirely from hands-on work experience. Even so, I think I'm very much lacking and I’m very interested in this episode, because we are going to go through some great resources that I am also going to check out later. So let’s get this party started. [00:03:22] DC: Awesome. So you want to just talk about kind of the general ideas behind distributed systems and like how you became introduced to them or like where you started in that journey? [00:03:32] CC: Yeah. Let’s do that. [00:03:35] DC: My first experience with the idea of distributed systems was in using them before I knew that they were distributed systems, right? One of the very first distributed systems as I look back on it that I ever actually spent any real time with was DNS, which I consider to be something of a distributed system. If you think about it, they have name servers, they have a bunch of caching servers. They solve many of the same sorts of problems. In a previous episode, we talked about how networking, just the general idea of networking and handling large-scale architecting networks. It’s also in a way very – has a lot of analogues into distributed systems. For me, I think working with and helping solve the problems that are associated with them over time gave me a good foundational understanding for when we were doing distributed systems as a thing later on in my career. [00:04:25] CC: You said something that caught my interest, and it’s very intere