Top Books on Distributed Systems

February 27, 2026 · View on GitHub

Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann - 2017 - The go-to guide for storage, streams, consistency, and real-world system trade-offs.
Release It!, 2nd Ed. - Michael T. Nygard - 2018 - Stability patterns and failure-mode thinking for production systems.
Site Reliability Engineering - Beyer, Jones, Petoff, Murphy - 2016 - Reliability principles, SLOs, toil reduction, and operating at scale — free online.
The SRE Workbook - Beyer, Murphy, Rensin, Kawahara - 2018 - Hands-on companion to the SRE book with real implementation examples — free online.
Kubernetes: Up & Running, 3rd Ed. - Hightower, Burns, Beda - 2022 - A practical mental model for Kubernetes and container orchestration.
Building Event-Driven Microservices - Adam Bellemare - 2020 - How to design and build event-driven systems at scale using streaming platforms.
Designing Distributed Systems, 2nd Ed. - Brendan Burns - 2023 - Patterns-based guide for reliable distributed apps with containers and Kubernetes.