The article lists down the lessons learnt by Google Engg. team while they implemented Google BigTable, a distributed storage system, which is used to manage structured data of more than 60 Google products or so. Read further about Google BigTable on this page.

KISS Principle for Simpler Design & Coding With distributed systems bound to be complex and the related codebase expected to evolve over a period of time, it may be good idea to keep the design and coding simple for ease of code maintenance and debugging. One could apply the KISS principle by breaking down the problem into smaller pieces and do the design and coding appropriately. Read more about KISS principle on some of the following pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

http://people.apache.org/~fhanik/kiss.html

YAGNI Principle to Avoid Complexity While working with distributed systems, one might want to delay adding new features until it is clear how the new features will be used. This is similar to what is mentioned by YAGNI principle – “Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them.”

Failures are bound to happen. Plan for it. Large distributed systems are vulnerable to many types of failures, some of which are listed below. One should, therefore, plan to take care of each one of them in a diligent manner and not make any assumptions whatsoever. Memory and network corruption

Large clock skew

Hung machines

Extended and asymmetric network partitions

Bugs in related systems

Overflow of disk quotas

Planned and un- planned hardware maintenance.