Martin Kleppmann's 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications' defined backend engineering practice for nearly a decade after its 2016 release. Now, nine years later, Kleppmann has co-authored a full second edition with Chris Riccomini, a LinkedIn colleague and author of 'The Missing README', published by O'Reilly Media with a 2026 copyright. The update targets a world where cloud computing is the default, not the exception.
The Pragmatic Engineer secured an excerpt covering two chapters: cloud versus self-hosting tradeoffs from Chapter 1, 'Trade-Offs in Data Systems Architecture', and a section on engineering ethics. The cloud tradeoff discussion anchors on the build-versus-buy question as a business priority decision, not a technical one. That framing alone is worth the read.
The full piece goes deeper than the excerpt summary suggests. The original article links directly to the O'Reilly edition and includes Kleppmann's appearance on The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, where topics like the declining relevance of MapReduce are also covered. If you build distributed systems and the first edition is worn out on your shelf, the second edition is already written for the infrastructure reality you are working in now.
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