Can someone compare this to Martin Kleppman's awesome book "Designing Data Intensive Applications"? I'm wondering if this book is like the old IBM, etc. whitepapers which quietly tried to sell technologies from the writer's company?
Martin's book takes an application focused approach. How do I think about changes to my data in a distributed environment? You can see this thinking in the projects he's been involved with on Kafka and at LinkedIn.
Brendan, however take on distributed system is from the angle of heterogenous distributed workloads and the architectural blocks needed for running such systems reliably. Note that Burns worked at Google and was one of the founders of Kubernetes so you will find a bit of a container orchestration slant in the book too.