Fundamentals

My first introduction to building distributed computing systems were, when we built VOIP softswitch at Sonus networks allowing people to make voip calls in early 2000(thousands of apps have been built on this since then including vonage to skype to conferencing systems).

What I took away from that experience still holds good, as we talk about building scalable systems to handle massive users or data.

Following is a good paper, which is relevant to today's context.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2482856

I suggest learning these concepts with an open source framework and follow the trail(like Apache Mesos) and following video gives you idea around how open source frameworks can do the job these days(This is just a very small example of how to build a PaaS using Mesos...There are so many toolsets you will discover as you take this trail).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTcZGODnyf0

I just want to leave it here and we will touch various related topics in different blogs.