Rules of the Road for Building Distributed Applications

With the broad adoption of microservices, serverless, SaaS, etc., software systems are increasingly likely to be distributed systems. If you keep state in more than one place, you’ve got a distributed system whether you like it or not. Distributed systems allow for some tremendous advantages, but engineering teams, sometimes unwittingly, also confront all the additional challenges & complexity of distributed systems. At Ticketmaster, we’ve identified a handful of design ‘rules of the road’ that help mitigate the disadvantages and maximize the advantages that come with building a distributed system. This talk will review those rules, why they are helpful, how they reinforce each other, and discuss how they might be rolled out incrementally to your teams & systems.