"The Maginot Line was a huge fortress that ran the length
of the Franco-German border and was constructed at great
expense between World War I and World War II. It
successfully kept the German army from directly crossing
the border between France and Germany. It was quickly
bypassed by the Germans in 1940 who invaded through
Belgium"

I've been hearing Kafka mentioned more often recently so I was sniffing around it. This design doc is a good lesson on everything from page read/write metrics, concurrency, and persistence. This is how design docs should be written.

About a year's worth of reading on distributed systems here.

"Detecting failures is a fundamental issue for fault-tolerance in distributed systems. Recently, many people have
come to realize that failure detection ought to be provided as some form of generic service, similar to IP address
lookup or time synchronization. However, this has not been successful so far. One of the reasons is the difficulty
to satisfy several application requirements simultaneously when using classical failure detectors."

"The most important contribution of SEDA, I think, was the fact that we made load and resource bottlenecks explicit in the application programming model."

When your systems are distributed, with varying throughput and resiliency, you can't treat pieces of your architecture as function calls, returning data instantly, consistently, and reliably. The "load and resource bottlenecks" are integral parts of the logic of your software and contracts have to be written and programmed against.

SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned,
Scalable Internet Services

A little light on details but talks a bit about how they use Amazon SimpleDB, Cassandra, and HBase.

"A new wire protocol enabling applications to connect directly in a real-time and fully distributed manner, freeing them from relying on centralized datacenters"

Nice little run-down of distributed systems.