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Lecture 1: Introduction

Lecture 1: Introduction

MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems
5 HN recommenders · discussed 2020–2025
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About this video

The opening lecture of MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems (Spring 2020), introducing the course and core challenges of distributed systems. It begins a playlist that goes on to cover Raft and other consensus papers in Go.

Why it appears in the archive

Recommended as the standard free course for learning distributed systems from real papers.

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

taude · 2020-12 · rec

MIT online trainig has this great YouTube playlist on distributed systems, with one of the lectures being on RAFT [1,2,3]. The entire playlist [4] is probably worth your time, though. [1] Intro [LINK] [2] Part I: [LINK] [3] Part II [LINK] [4] Playlist for the course: [VIDEO]

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yes_but_no · 2021-02 · rec

Not a book nor a paper, but MIT has published their recent Distr. Systems lectures[0] on youtube. Haven't finished it yet but it touches on papers that stood the test of times. [0] [VIDEO]

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uyt · 2021-06 · rec

Not from stanford but I enjoyed these: MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems [VIDEO] CMU The Databaseology Lectures [LINK] You essentially learn systems by looking at lots and lots of examples of how good real world systems are designed.

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avinassh · 2023-04 · rec

Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [LINK] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [VIDEO] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - [LINK] Crafting Interpreters - [LINK] > What made it so special these break down really complex topics and make the concepts approachable. As a noob, I learned a lot from these.

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avinassh · 2023-08 · rec

Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [LINK] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [VIDEO] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - [LINK] Crafting Interpreters - [LINK]

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bigmutant · 2025-02 · rec

Good resources for understanding Distributed Systems: - MIT course with Robert Morris (of Morris Worm fame): [VIDEO] - Martin Kleppmann (author of DDIA): [LINK] If you can work through the above (and DDIA), you'll have a solid understanding of the issues in Distributed System, like Consensus, Causality, Split Brain, etc. You'll also gain a critical eye of Cloud Services and be able to articulate their drawbacks (ex: did you know that replication to DynamoDB Secondary Indexes is eventually consistent? What effects can that have on your applications?)

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whbrown · 2020-11 · reference

Web backend work at scale is all about building and maintaining distributed systems. Just consider the company where Go was designed ... And indeed, it's still a language of choice for teaching systems design[1]. [1] MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems - [VIDEO]

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