Distributed Systems Lab

An ongoing Java project focused on learning distributed systems by building increasingly complex systems from scratch. The project begins with basic TCP communication and concurrency, gradually progressing toward multi-node coordination, fault tolerance, replication, leader election, and consensus.

Rather than relying on frameworks, the goal is to understand the underlying problems that distributed systems solve and the engineering tradeoffs behind them.

Learning Path

TCP Networking
Concurrency & Multithreading
Thread Pools
Custom Protocols
Persistent Storage
Multi-Node Communication
Service Discovery
Failure Detection
Distributed Job Queues
Replication
Leader Election
Consensus

Progress

01 - TCP Echo Server

Built a basic TCP client and server from scratch in Java. The client establishes a connection to the server, sends messages, and receives responses.

Learned:

TCP/IP
Sockets
Ports
Client/server communication
Blocking I/O