Unreliable Networks

Introduction

A distributed system is a cluster of computer hosts connected by a network. Each computer host has storage, CPU, memory, and other operating system resources. This kind of setup is called shared-nothing architecture because the host doesn't share its resources and communicates only via a network.

Shared-nothing architecture works well because it is easy to implement, reason about, and deploy on cheap commodity hardware with redundancy. A reliable communication network is the most crucial factor for a distributed system’s success.

This section will discuss some critical issues related to networks and host systems in a distributed system.