Lecture 1: Introduction

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: [this video]

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] [this video]

Not from stanford but I enjoyed these: MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems [this 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.

Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [link] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [this 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.

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

Good resources for understanding Distributed Systems: - MIT course with Robert Morris (of Morris Worm fame): [this 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?)

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 - [this video]