Distributed Systems

Distributed systems are computing systems in which components located on networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages. The components interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal. Three significant characteristics of distributed systems are: concurrency of components, lack of a global clock, and independent failure of components.

Some examples of distributed systems include cloud computing systems, massively multiplayer online games, peer-to-peer file sharing networks, and blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. These systems handle large numbers of concurrent requests and scale to support large numbers of users by distributing work across multiple nodes in the network. However, the decentralized nature of distributed systems also introduces challenges like dealing with partial failures, maintaining data consistency, and handling race conditions when components access shared resources like databases. Careful software design is required to build reliable distributed systems that can recover from component failures and keep operating normally. Techniques like load balancing, redundancy, and transactions help provide the fault tolerance and high availability required of production-quality distributed systems.