Global confidence in institutions is in steep decline worldwide. Technology frequently lets us down too. Brian Behlendorf explains why trust is essential to building a functioning society and how it's under serious threat. Brian argues that open source software offers a model for how we can work together, even when we have no reason to trust each other.

Akka, the distributed systems toolkit, has been pushing the envelope of distributed and reactive systems for many years now. Konrad Malawski and Henrik Engstrm walk you through writing services using state-of-the-art technology like Akka Cluster and Streams and expose them as microservices using Akka HTTP, Play, or Lagom.

Bridget Kromhout compares the architectural patterns of modern distributed systems with the communication patterns of successful teams, explaining how to apply the principles and practices of a DevOps culture to ensure we build systems designed for humans.

Many organizations are moving toward a distributed system architecture like command query responsibility segregation (CQRS) and event sourcing. Maria Gomez and Stacey Watro discuss the challenges of deploying and supporting these systems in production and explore different strategies to mitigate these challenges, such as building resilient systems and monitoring.