Design Principles for Modern Distributed Systems

The design principles used for Amazon's S3 are generally applicable to modern distributed systems design. Quoting the S3 design principles:

Amazon S3 Design Principles

The following principles of distributed system design were used to meet Amazon S3 requirements:

• Decentralization: Use fully decentralized techniques to remove scaling bottlenecks and single points of failure.

• Asynchrony: The system makes progress under all circumstances.

• Autonomy: The system is designed such that individual components can make decisions based on local information.

• Local responsibility: Each individual component is responsible for achieving its consistency; this is never the burden of its peers.

• Controlled concurrency: Operations are designed such that no or limited concurrency control is required.

• Failure tolerant: The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation, and continues operation with no or minimal interruption.

• Controlled parallelism: Abstractions used in the system are of such granularity that parallelism can be used to improve performance and robustness of recovery or the introduction of new nodes.

• Decompose into small well-understood building blocks: Do not try to provide a single service that does everything for everyone, but instead build small components that can be used as building blocks for other services.

• Symmetry: Nodes in the system are identical in terms of functionality, and require no or minimal node-specific configuration to function.

• Simplicity: The system should be made as simple as possible (but no simpler).