Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems

Dr. Kenneth P. Birman is an ACM Fellow and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University.  He received the 2009 IEEE Tsukomo Kanai Award for his fundamental and practical contributions to distributed computing, fault tolerance, reliability and distributed systems management, and has authored nearly 200 journal and conference papers in the area.  Examples of settings in which his work has been applied include the communications infrastructure of the NYSE, the Swiss Stock Exchange, the US Navy's AEGIS warship, the French air-traffic control system, and a wide range of cutting edge cloud-computing products.

Part I: Computing in the Cloud.- The Way of the Cloud.- Client Perspective.- Network Perspective.- The Structure of Cloud Data Centers.- Remote Procedure Calls and the Client/Server Mode.- CORBA: The Common Object Request Broker Architecture.- System Support for Fast Client/Server Communication.- Part II: Reliable Distributed Computing.- How and Why Computer Systems Fail.- Overcoming Failures in a Distributed System.- Dynamic Membership.- Group Communication Systems.- Point to Point and Multi-group Considerations.- The Virtual Synchrony Execution Model.- Consistency in Distributed Systems.- Part III: Applications of Reliability Techniques.- Retrofitting Reliability into Complex Systems.- Software Architectures for Group Communication.- Part IV: Related Technologies.- Security Options for Distributed Settings.- Clock Synchronization and Synchronous Systems.- Transactional Systems.- Peer-to-Peer Systems and Probabilistic Protocols.- Appendix A: Virtually Synchronous Methodology For Building Dynamic Reliable Services.- Appendix B: Isis2API.- Appendix C: Problems.