Understanding Distributed Systems

By Roberto Vitillo

Roberto Vitillo distills years of experience building distributed systems into a practical, readable guide. The book covers the core challenges of distributed computing — communication, coordination, replication, consistency, and fault tolerance — without drowning you in academic theory.

Each chapter focuses on a real problem you will encounter when building systems that run across multiple machines: how networks fail, why clocks cannot be trusted, how to handle retries safely, and how consensus protocols actually work. If you are a backend engineer working with microservices, message queues, or cloud infrastructure, this book gives you the mental models to reason about reliability and design systems that handle failure gracefully.