Preface

This book describes how to design, build, and operate some of the largest and most complex computer organizations humanity has conceived. As such, we naturally have a lot of information to cover! While every attempt has been made to describe how to do things “from the ground up,” we do assume the reader has some background knowledge of computers, networks, operating systems, and programming languages.

Since we are only at the dawn of planetary scale computing, I fully expect and encourage readers to identify and suggest improvements to the systems presented in this book. I consider this book a living digest of the best known methods and I hope that it evolves with the field as new techniques are discovered and debated over time. I will attempt to keep it updated with the best practices and patterns from the wild.

All of the code in this book is freely available for study. I attempted to keep the code as simple as possible to understand the key concepts, and no simpler. I attempt to note the drawbacks of such simplistic code, where relevant. Large language models were a valuable asset in creating such a large and cohesive corpus of code, and I encourage interested readers to leverage these tools to analyze, learn from, and extend the information presented in this book.