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✅ Master Level
Distributed Systems Patterns
Complete Beginner → Advanced Syllabus (Pin-to-Pin)
🟢 LEVEL 1 — Distributed Basics
1. Distributed Systems Definition
- Multiple independent machines
- Network communication
- Partial failures
- No shared memory
2. Challenges in Distribution
- Network latency
- Partial failures
- Message loss
- Clock synchronization
🟢 LEVEL 2 — Load Balancing
3. Load Balancer Role
- Request distribution
- Availability improvement
- Throughput scaling
- Health checks
4. Load Balancing Strategies
- Round-robin
- Least connections
- IP hash
- Weighted distribution
🟡 LEVEL 3 — Service Discovery
5. Service Registration
- Service registry
- Health check registration
- Metadata management
- Deregistration process
6. Service Discovery Patterns
- Client-side discovery
- Server-side discovery
- DNS-based discovery
- Service mesh discovery
🟡 LEVEL 4 — Resilience Patterns
7. Circuit Breaker Pattern
- Closed state (normal)
- Open state (failing)
- Half-open state (testing)
- Failure threshold
8. Bulkhead Pattern
- Resource isolation
- Thread pools per service
- Connection limits
- Failure containment
🟠 LEVEL 5 — Retry Mechanisms
9. Retry Strategies
- Simple retries
- Exponential backoff
- Jitter addition
- Retry budgets
10. Idempotency Requirements
- Safe retry conditions
- Request deduplication
- Idempotent operations
- Non-idempotent handling
🟠 LEVEL 6 — Timeout Management
11. Timeout Design
- Connection timeouts
- Read timeouts
- Request timeouts
- Timeout tuning
12. Cascading Failures
- Failure propagation
- Timeout chains
- Deadline propagation
- Context cancellation
🔵 LEVEL 7 — Monitoring & Observability
13. Health Checks
- Liveness probes
- Readiness probes
- Startup probes
- Custom health policies
14. Metrics Collection
- Request latency
- Error rates
- Service availability
- Dependency health
🔵 LEVEL 8 — Consensus & Coordination
15. Consensus Algorithms
- Leader election
- Raft protocol
- Paxos algorithm
- Byzantine fault tolerance
16. Distributed Coordination
- Distributed locks
- Leader-based coordination
- Quorum semantics
- Split-brain handling
🔴 LEVEL 9 — Architecture & Governance
17. System Design Decisions
- Synchronous vs asynchronous
- Strong vs eventual consistency
- Availability vs consistency
- Complexity vs capability
18. Operations & SLOs
- Service-level objectives
- Dependency management
- Graceful degradation
- Operational readiness
⭐ Senior Frontend Focus (Must Master)
- Understanding service failure modes from frontend
- Timeout & retry handling in client code
- Error handling for distributed systems
- Circuit breaker patterns in frontend HTTP clients
- Health check integration with frontend
- Graceful degradation UI patterns
- Monitoring distributed system health from frontend