🏆 30 Best Distributed Systems Talks of All Time
Happy Tuesday 👋 and a warm welcome to another special edition of Tech Talks Weekly!
I’ve been recently reading the second edition of Martin Kleppmann’s Designing Data-Intensive Applications and it sent me down a rabbit hole. This extra issue is the result of it. I decided to put together a list of distributed systems talks that I think are a must-watch. It initially ended up burried in my notes, but then I thought it’d be nice to share it with you, so here it is!
This is how the talks are organized:
Foundational talks and courses that focues on the theory and includes the full Cambridge course from Martin Kleppmann.
Company case studies: how Netflix, Cloudflare, Duolingo, … run distributed systems at scale.
Distributed systems architecture: event-driven architecutre, storage engines, consensus, cellular architecture, resilience/HA patterns, …
Classics: the iconic talks from Joe Armstrong, Leslie Lamport, Martin Fowler, Caitie McCaffrey, Greg Young, and other legends I simply had to include.
Every talk in this list can be found in Tech Talks Weekly Database which is the tool I used to build this compilation. It includes the full archive of conference talks & podcasts published since 2020, with search, filter, and sort. It now costs $7 $5, so roughly a ☕️ a month.
I plan to create a new edition of this issue every year. Subscribe to Tech Talks Weekly to get future editions:
Just before we start, if this format is useful, hit the ❤️ or reply. I’m planning more themed compilations like this one.
I. Foundational talks and courses
1. “Distributed Systems lectures (Martin Kleppmann)” from University of Cambridge, 2020
Course (8 lectures) ⸱ Nov 4, 2020
2. “Distributed Systems - What Can Go Wrong and How to Get It Right by Florian Mair” from Devoxx Belgium 2025
Conference ⸱ +500 views ⸱ Feb 27, 2026 ⸱ 00h 33m 32s
3. “The 3 Golden Rules of Distributed Systems” from QCon London 2025
Conference ⸱ +4k views ⸱ Sep 15, 2025 ⸱ 00h 50m 50s
4. “The three new fallacies of distributed computing — Thoughtworks Technology Podcast” from Thoughtworks Technology Podcast, 2025
Podcast ⸱ +500 views ⸱ Jun 26, 2025 ⸱ 00h 46m 55s
5. “Predicting the Future of Distributed Systems - Colin Breck | Craft 2025” from Craft Conference 2025
Conference ⸱ +2k views ⸱ Apr 15, 2026 ⸱ 00h 32m 59s
6. “Consistency and Agreements in Distributed Systems - Jimmy Bogard - NDC London 2025” from NDC London 2025
Conference ⸱ +3k views ⸱ Mar 4, 2025 ⸱ 01h 01m 30s
7. “24/7 State Replication” from QCon Plus November 2022
Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Sep 4, 2023 ⸱ 00h 49m 44s
2. Company case studies
8. “The Microservice Myth: What Monzo Learned About Scaling a Bank” from QCon San Francisco 2025 (Monzo)
Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Sep 17, 2025 ⸱ 00h 46m 29s
9. “AWS re:Invent 2024 - How Netflix handles sudden load spikes in the cloud (NFX301)” from AWS re:Invent 2024 (Netflix)
Conference ⸱ +29k views ⸱ Dec 10, 2024 ⸱ 00h 49m 10s
10. “Delivering Millions of Notifications within Seconds During the Super Bowl” from InfoQ Dev Summit Boston 2024 (Duolingo)
Conference ⸱ +7k views ⸱ Aug 21, 2024 ⸱ 00h 47m 49s
11. “Sleeping at Scale - Delivering 10k Timers per Second per Node with Rust, Tokio, Kafka, and Scylla” from QCon San Francisco 2023 (OneSignal)
Conference ⸱ +2k views ⸱ Jul 22, 2024 ⸱ 00h 48m 40s
12. “How Netflix Ensures Highly-Reliable Online Stateful Systems” from QCon San Francisco 2023 (Netflix)
Conference ⸱ +8k views ⸱ Mar 12, 2024 ⸱ 00h 49m 32s
13. “Tales of Kafka @Cloudflare: Lessons Learnt on the Way to 1 Trillion Messages” from QCon London 2023 (Cloudflare)
Conference ⸱ +3k views ⸱ Dec 4, 2023 ⸱ 00h 32m 22s
III. Distributed systems architecture
14. “Beyond Pub/Sub - Advanced Messaging Patterns - Poornima Nayar - NDC London 2026” from NDC London 2026
Conference ⸱ +6k views ⸱ Feb 5, 2026 ⸱ 01h 01m 11s
15. “Top 10 Event Driven Architecture Pitfalls by Victor Rentea” from Devoxx Belgium 2025
Conference ⸱ +9k views ⸱ Oct 9, 2025 ⸱ 00h 50m 54s
16. “How Event Driven Architectures Go Wrong & How to Fix Them • Matthew Meckes • GOTO 2024” from GOTO EDA Day London 2024
Conference ⸱ +25k views ⸱ Jul 29, 2024 ⸱ 00h 29m 55s
17. “Complexity is the Gotcha of Event-driven Architecture • David Boyne • GOTO 2024” from GOTO EDA Day London 2024
Conference ⸱ +76k views ⸱ Jul 2, 2024 ⸱ 00h 46m 58s
18. “Kafka for Architects • Ekaterina Gorshkova & Viktor Gamov • GOTO 2026” from GOTO Book Club, 2026
Podcast ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Apr 23, 2026 ⸱ 00h 28m 13s
19. “7+ million Postgres tables | Kailash Nadh | IndiaFOSS 2024 | FOSS United” from IndiaFOSS 2024
Conference ⸱ +42k views ⸱ Dec 3, 2024 ⸱ 00h 20m 34s
20. “AWS re:Invent 2025 - DynamoDB: Resilience & lessons from the Oct 2025 service disruption (DAT453)” from AWS re:Invent 2025
Conference ⸱ +18k views ⸱ Dec 7, 2025 ⸱ 00h 59m 11s
21. “Architecting for High Availability in the Cloud with Cellular Architecture” from QCon San Francisco 2023
Conference ⸱ +2k views ⸱ Jun 10, 2024 ⸱ 00h 47m 38s
22. “”Designing Dope Distributed Systems for Outer Space with High-Fidelity Simulation” by Toby Bell” from Strange Loop 2023
Conference ⸱ +6k views ⸱ Oct 5, 2023 ⸱ 00h 44m 44s
IV. Classics
23. “Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices (Caitie McCaffrey)” from J on the Beach 2017
Conference ⸱ Jun 8, 2017
24. “A Decade of DDD, CQRS, Event Sourcing (Greg Young)” from DDD Europe 2016
Conference ⸱ Jan 28, 2016
25. “Microservices (Martin Fowler)” from GOTO Berlin 2014
Conference ⸱ Dec 8, 2014
26. “Migrating to Cloud Native with Microservices (Adrian Cockcroft)” from GOTO Berlin 2014
Conference ⸱ Dec 8, 2014
27. “Turning the Database Inside-Out with Apache Samza (Martin Kleppmann)” from Strange Loop 2014
Conference ⸱ Sep 18, 2014
28. “Thinking Above the Code (Leslie Lamport)” from Microsoft Build 2014
Conference ⸱ Apr 15, 2014
29. “Call Me Maybe: Carly Rae Jepsen and the Perils of Network Partitions (Kyle Kingsbury / Aphyr)” from RICON 2013
Conference ⸱ Oct 29, 2013
30. “Systems That Run Forever, Self-Heal and Scale (Joe Armstrong)” from Strange Loop 2013
Conference ⸱ +81k views ⸱ Sep 18, 2013 ⸱ 01h 10m 23s
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