Thank you. I hope more companies would abandon the form-then-download approach, and understand that if someone is interested in the products, people will eventually get in touch.
Can someone compare this to Martin Kleppman's awesome book "Designing Data Intensive Applications"? I'm wondering if this book is like the old IBM, etc. whitepapers which quietly tried to sell technologies from the writer's company?
The books are similar but very different at the same time.
Martin's book takes an application focused approach. How do I think about changes to my data in a distributed environment?
You can see this thinking in the projects he's been involved with on Kafka and at LinkedIn.
Brendan, however take on distributed system is from the angle of heterogenous distributed workloads and the architectural blocks needed for running such systems reliably. Note that Burns worked at Google and was one of the founders of Kubernetes so you will find a bit of a container orchestration slant in the book too.
I think Designing Data Intensive Applications covers more than this, but this still looks interesting, perhaps a potentially nice (and free) read before diving into the other one. Doesn't seem whitepaper-y at all.
Every book has its own merit (well, I will backtrack by saying some technical books are really bad), though thanks for the recommendation. This E-Book is primarily an introduction using common/trendy technologies in practice. Not a deep-dive or theoretical studies of <name> distributed system.
Designing Data Intensive applications seemed to me a like a good balance between too academic and too practical. It was at perfect level of abstraction for me.
[0] - Always subject to change of course