Tag: distributed-system

A simple introduction to distributed systems

A couple of weeks back a junior developer asked me a seemingly simple question – What is a distributed system? One question led to another and we end up spending more than an hour discussing different aspects of distributed systems. I felt my knowledge on distributed systems was rusty and I was unable to explain concepts in a simple and clear manner.

In the last two weeks since our discussion I spent time reading distributed systems literature to gain better understanding of the basics. In a series of post starting today, I will cover distributed system basics. In today’s post we will cover what and why of distributed systems.

Continue reading “A simple introduction to distributed systems”

CAP Theorem for Application Developers

Most of us are building distributed systems. This is a fact. According to Wikipedia, a distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which then communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to each other. A distributed system could either be a standard three-tier web application or it could be a massive multiplayer online game.

The goal of a distributed system is to solve a problem that can’t be solved on a single machine. A single machine can’t provide enough compute or storage resources required to solve the problem. The user of a distributed system perceives the collection of autonomous machines as a single unit.

The distributed systems are complex as there are several moving parts. You can scale out components to finish the workloads in a reasonable time. Because of numerous moving parts and their different scaling needs it becomes difficult to reason out the characteristics of a distributed applications. CAP theorem can help us.

Continue reading “CAP Theorem for Application Developers”

Caitie McCaffrey Talk: The Verification of a Distributed System

This is a great video that explains importance of developer testing in writing robust distributed system. She talked about unit testing, integration testing, and verification language that can be used to verify a system. Unit testing is the first thing a developer can do to make sure distributed system is correct. She shared a number of anecdotes in the talk that make this talk easy to understand.