Tag Archives: distributed-system

A simple introduction to distributed systems

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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.

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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.

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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.