system architecture

Rich Hickey's 2013 talk applies language-design thinking to whole systems, covering names, queues, data, failure, and the interfaces between programs. It ends with a call to action for building systems holistically.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

An AWS re:Invent 2014 talk on the core distributed systems primitives behind AWS and Amazon.com, such as consensus, key-value stores and transactional logging. It describes how AWS builds large services from a few common building blocks.

The first lecture in Martin Kleppmann's 8-lecture distributed systems series from the University of Cambridge undergraduate course. It introduces the subject, and accompanying lecture notes are available.

Martin Fowler's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on the different things people mean by event-driven architecture. He identifies four patterns, including event notification and event-carried state transfer.

Bob Nystrom, author of Game Programming Patterns, gives a Roguelike Celebration 2018 talk questioning whether entity component systems are the only way to structure a game. He walks through alternative architectures drawn from roguelike development.

A GDC 2015 talk in which Natalya Tatarchuk describes the multithreaded renderer Bungie built for Destiny. It covers the low-latency architecture across platforms, its successes and its challenges.

Bryan Hunter's GigCityElixir 2023 talk on HCA Healthcare's Waterpark system, built on Elixir/Erlang. It describes how the architecture is distributed and fault-tolerant, with a multi-datacenter cluster and runtime code swapping.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

Dr. Richard Cook, a physician and patient safety researcher, presents his ideas on how complex systems fail, at Velocity 2012. He argues for designing for resiliency rather than trying to exhaustively handle every failure mode.

FreeBSD developer Benno Rice traces the history of init and bootstrap systems at linux.conf.au 2019 to explain why systemd was seen as necessary and why it provokes such strong reactions. He also discusses why change is scary.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

Benno Rice's BSDCan 2018 talk on why systemd exists and what it got right and wrong. It traces the history of Unix init and why Linux distributions adopted it, while asking what the BSDs should learn.

José Valim's ElixirConf US 2023 closing keynote on the foundations of the Elixir type system, covering set-theoretic types and gradual typing with strong arrows.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

Simon Brown's Agile on the Beach 2019 talk presents the C4 model, a lightweight approach to diagramming software architecture with a shared vocabulary and simple notation.

A Kurzgesagt animation of how the immune system responds to a bacterial infection, depicting immune cells as an army defending the body.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) talks about clean architecture and design, including keeping the database and frameworks out of the center of an application. It is an hour-long conference talk.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

A Microsoft Build 2019 session in which the WSL team explains the new WSL 2 architecture, which runs a real Linux kernel alongside Windows on a hypervisor. It covers faster file performance, Linux file access from Windows and better application support.

Bryan Cantrill's QCon SF 2019 talk asking whether operating systems should be rewritten in Rust. He draws on his systems experience to discuss C, memory safety and Rust's fit for system software.

David Patterson's talk on the history of computer architecture, from RISC and superscalar designs to the end of Dennard scaling and Moore's Law. It argues that domain-specific architectures and open instruction sets open a new golden age.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) presents the principles of Clean Architecture, covering dependency direction, boundaries, and why frameworks and databases should be details rather than the center of an application.

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

Chris Houser's Clojure/conj talk on why Clojure's exceptions destroy information as the stack unwinds, unlike Common Lisp's condition system, which can resume from the error site. He surveys the existing libraries that approximate conditions, explains why they don't compose with each other, and considers what a better design would look like.

A panel from the Lang NEXT 2014 conference on systems programming in 2014 and beyond. Language designers including Bjarne Stroustrup and Rob Pike discuss the topic, including C++ header compile times.

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

Andrew Tanenbaum's FOSDEM 2010 talk on MINIX 3, a microkernel OS built for high reliability and security. It shows how the system detects and recovers from device driver crashes, and addresses microkernel performance concerns.

Joe Armstrong's Strange Loop 2013 talk on building large scalable systems from small isolated parallel components. It covers detecting and correcting errors at run time, changing code while it runs, and how Erlang embodies these principles.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 talk on how AWS limits the blast radius of failures. It covers design techniques such as cell-based architecture and shuffle sharding.

A short clip from an ACM and Computer History Museum interview in which Leslie Lamport discusses writing his paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events. He explains its link to special relativity.

Timothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich delivers the joint USENIX ATC/OSDI 2021 keynote arguing that operating systems must reckon with modern hardware, which is a heterogeneous collection of processors, firmware and coprocessors rather than a simple machine. It shows how much runs below and beside Linux.

Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully. He shows how functional architecture leads to a pit of success, with a pure core and impure shell.

Brandon Rhodes' PyOhio 2014 talk on applying the Clean Architecture in Python. He shows how this high-level design pattern fits Python's features and addresses maintainability problems in large applications.

Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Aaron Hsu's FnConf18 talk asks whether APL needs a static type system. He argues that APL's expressiveness and rapid iteration already deliver the benefits usually credited to types.

A Kurzgesagt animation giving a big-picture tour of the human immune system, its organs, transport network, and the cells it produces every day. It accompanies their IMMUNE book.