Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems [Paperback] Kleppmann, Martin

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
By Martin Kleppmann

This book is a comprehensive guide to building modern software systems that handle vast amounts of data. Martin Kleppmann explains the fundamental principles behind data-intensive applications—systems where the primary challenges are not CPU or memory, but managing, storing, processing, and retrieving data reliably and efficiently.

The book covers key concepts such as databases, distributed systems, messaging queues, and stream processing, with a strong focus on the trade-offs involved in designing for reliability, scalability, and maintainability. It explores how to ensure data consistency, handle failures gracefully, and design architectures that can grow with user demand.

Kleppmann combines theory with real-world examples, drawing from both academic research and practical systems like Kafka, Cassandra, Hadoop, PostgreSQL, and others. Each chapter breaks down complex topics like replication, partitioning, transactions, batch processing, and real-time event streams into clear, digestible explanations.

Ideal for software engineers, architects, and computer science students, this book has become a reference for anyone designing or operating large-scale applications. It doesn’t prescribe one-size-fits-all solutions, but instead equips readers with the understanding needed to evaluate options and make informed design decisions for their own systems.