My Favorite Resources for Staying Current on Distributed and Scalable Systems Development

After joining AWS a few years ago, I found myself building and operating the largest distributed and scaled systems of my professional career.   The following news sources that were previously interesting and useful became crucial for my day-to-day life.

• InfoQ - Direct content primarily sourced from hand's on practitioners and reviewed by editors.  Check out the Architecture & Design section. 
• DZone - Articles (70k+), Refcardz (200+), Guides (30+), and Zones (14 categories, nearly all relating to distributed systems at some level).  While the Zones cut across many areas, I find Cloud, Big Data, and Database especially useful.
• High Scalability - Weekly digest in the world of distributed/scalable systems plus some independent and paid content.
• Thoughtworks Technology Radar (Platforms) - Thoughtworks has some great minds in the area of distributed software development, and their overall Technology Radar is updated semi-annually with their opinion of where certain areas in technology are moving.  Bonus points - build a technology radar for your team!
• All Things Distributed (AWS CTO Werner Vogels' Blog) - Recently a great deal of AWS region launches, but occasional and historical distributed/scalable content.   
• The Next Platform (partnered with UK-based The Register) - Enterprise vendor specific news source -  "Offers in-depth coverage of high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers, and public clouds."
• ...and finally, company engineering blogs such as Uber, AirBnB, Facebook, and Netflix.

These resources allow me to take others' learnings to enhance my mindset and think and act at 10x in terms of performance, scale, volume, variety, velocity, failures, etc.  However, one doesn't need to be working at AWS to require this level of currency.  Market expectations now demand that we build and operate (or at least think in the case of prototyping/early development) at this scale across every solution to deliver value to customers and stakeholders.

Also, if you're looking for a great resource for learning (more) about Distributed Systems from beginner to expert, check out awesome-distributed-systems repo on GitHub including a link to a good intro video.

While these are mine, what are yours?

~m@

 *Photo by Simon Cockell / CC BY

Matt Roberts - Cloud Architect Circa 2001?

I helped start a company called Meetrix, which delivered multi-point collaboration services back in 2001.  We had a good run for about 4 years, but we ended up taking a bridge loan (bridge to nowhere), and the whole thing went through bankruptcy for $10k.  At one point, the offer had been in the millions, but it "wasn't enough".  Sigh.

Anyhoo, as we were strapped for cash and our original investors were all Enron guys who ended up pulling back the $5 - 10MM promised for the initial investment, I had to get creative on putting the service together.  So, I looked for third-party solutions that I could customize, keeping the IP of the multipoint audio and video conferencing as our core.  IBM/Lotus Sametime was the software that I selected to use as the meeting room (like now WebEx/Gotomeeting) software that would kick off the audio/video portion.  In order to make this happen for our SaaS model, I had to make some *ahem* modifications to the source.  What we wound up was with a "cloud" based version of Lotus Sametime that was multi-tenant.  This, of course, was before anyone referred to the cloud except in fancy architecture presentations where you'd always start with a cloud representing the Internet.  It was also SaaS before anyone came up with that particular popular palindrome.  It worked really well, and ended up being the only thing that survived the bankruptcy and ever since, some of the guys have been working the model.

I just heard that they won the 2011 Beacon Award "IBM Cloud Computing Innovation - For Application Providers."

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https://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandler/pw_com_prb_2011_beacon_smarter_solutions

Meetrix is the first company to virtualize Lotus Sametime in a public or private Cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. Meetrix UC in the Cloud integrates Telco 2.0 telephony and third-party plug-ins. The innovative Cloud-based design delivers low-cost, secure, anytime, anywhere unified communications and collaboration; connecting people, data and environments and enhancing business productivity.

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So there you go--Matt Roberts, Cloud Architect, for over 10 years with expertise in multi-tenant Saas n-tier web applications.  I may even put it on my business card :)

@multicastmatt