What is a Distributed System?

Nowadays distributed systems are everywhere. Every time we watch a movie on-demand, shop online, or search for something on the internet, we communicate with a distributed system hidden from us by a web page or an app. Many well-known companies have highly scalable distributed systems to handle millions of customer’s data.

A distributed system consists of several processes running on different computers, that coordinate their actions by messaging through a network. They evolved as a response to problems that centralized systems had with performance, such as limited memory, and storage. Even the most powerful single machines become points of failure when they require maintenance or a reboot. Often the entire service goes down resulting in loss of money and trust.

A distributed system works as a single application dedicated specially for you. It solves all of the problems caused by single-machine applications. The processes of an application decouple from each other when housed in separate machines. If a machine becomes unavailable or breaks down, the others keep functioning and the system continues to perform its tasks. The ability to place a specific part of the global service closer to the customer greatly improves user experience. We also have the ability to increase or reduce the number of machines used by the application, providing us horizontal scalability. This flexibility allows the system to grow and shrink on demand, providing resources a business needs to maximize the cost efficiency of running services.

Though a well made distributed system functions as a single application, it is not easy to design or develop. Distributed systems are one of the most exciting and complicated topics in computer science, they require both skilled and highly professional engineers, possessing extensive experience in software design. Contact us if you have any questions regarding your personal software development project!