Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 5th edition

Broad and up-to-date coverage of the principles and practice in the fast moving area of Distributed Systems.
Distributed Systems provides students of computer science and engineering with the skills they will need to design and maintain software for distributed applications. It will also be invaluable to software engineers and systems designers wishing to understand new and future developments in the field.
From mobile phones to the Internet, our lives depend increasingly on distributed systems linking computers and other devices together in a seamless and transparent way. The fifth edition of this best-selling text continues to provide a comprehensive source of material on the principles and practice of distributed computer systems and the exciting new developments based on them, using a wealth of modern case studies to illustrate their design and development. The depth of coverage will enable students to evaluate existing distributed systems and design new ones.

The fifth edition of this book includes new chapters on the Google infrastructure, distributed objects and components, and indirect communication.

The book aims to provide an understanding of the principles on which the Internet and other distributed systems are based; their architecture, algorithms and design; and how they meet the demands of contemporary distributed applications. 

It begins with a set of seven chapters that together cover the building blocks for a study of distributed systems. The next set of chapters covers the important topic of middleware, examining different approaches to supporting distributed applications including distributed objects and components, web services and alternative peer-to-peer solutions. These are followed by chapters covering the well-established topics of security, distributed file systems and distributed naming before moving on to important data-related aspects including distributed transactions and data replication. Algorithms associated with all these topics are described as they arise and also in separate chapters devoted to timing, coordination and agreement.

The book culminates in chapters that address the emerging areas of mobile and ubiquitous computing and distributed multimedia systems before presenting a substantial case study focusing on the design and implementation of the distributed systems infrastructure that supports Google both in terms of core search functionality and the increasing range of additional services offered by Google (for example, Gmail and Google Earth).

New to the Fifth Edition 

New chapters:

Indirect Communication: Covering group communication, publish-subscribe and case studies on JavaSpaces, JMS, WebSphere and Message Queues.

Distributed Objects and Components: Covering component-based middleware and case studies on Enterprise JavaBeans, Fractal and CORBA.

Designing Distributed Systems: Devoted to a major new case study on the Google infrastructure.

Topics added to other chapters: 

Cloud computing, network virtualization, operating system virtualization, message passing interface, unstructured peer-to-peer, tuple spaces, loose coupling in relation to web services.

Other new case studies: 

Skype, Gnutella, TOTA, L2imbo, BitTorrent, End System Multicast.

• Provides an understanding of the principles on which the Internet and other distributed systems are based, their architecture, algorithms and design and how they meet the demands of contemporary distributed applications.  
• Broad and up-to-date coverage of the principles and practice in the fast moving area of Distributed Systems.
• Includes the key issues in the debate between components and web services as the way forward for industry.
• The depth of coverage will enable students to evaluate existing distributed systems and design new ones.
  
• Incorporates and anticipates the major developments in distributed systems technology.
• Case studies illustrate the design concepts for each major topic.
  

• Significant changes made in the earlier (foundational) chapters of the book in recognition of the increasing diversity of distributed systems — particularly in terms of the range of architectural approaches available to distributed systems developers today.
• Three entirely new chapters:
  • Chapter 6 Indirect Communication: Includes events and notification from 4th ed.
    
  • Chapter 8 Distributed Objects and Components: Includes precised version of the CORBA case study from 4th ed.
  • Chapter 21 Designing Distributed Systems: Includes major new case study on Google
• Substantial changes to a number of other chapters include:
  • Chapter 1 Characterization of DS: Significant restructuring of material: New section 1.2: Examples of dist. systems; Section 1.2.2: Cloud computing introduced
    
  • Chapter 2 System Models: Significant restructuring of material: New Section 2.2: Physical models; Section 2.3: major re-write to reflect new book content and associated architectural perspectives
  • Chapter 4 Interprocess Communication: Several updates: Client-server comm. moved to Chapter 5; New Section 4.5: Network virtualization (includes case study on Skype); New Section 4.6: Case Study on MPI; Case study on IPC in UNIX removed
    
  • Chapter 5 Remote Invocation: Significant restructuring of materia:l Client-server comm. moved to here; Progression introduced from client-server communication through RPC to RMI; Events and notification moved to Chapter 6
• Many of the chapters have been changed to reflect new information that has become available about the systems described.
• The authors have placed material removed from the fourth edition, as well as material removed from previous editions, on the book's Companion web site. This includes the case studies on ATM, inter-process communication in UNIX, CORBA (a shortened version of this case study remains in Chapter 8), the Jini distributed events specification, the chapter on distributed shared memory (a brief summary of this area is included in Chapter 6),and the case study of Grid middleware (featuring OGSA and the Globus toolkit).