Distributed Systems
Learn what distributed systems are and the challenges involved in debugging them.
So far, we have been dealing with software systems contained in mostly a single node or a machine and were exploring issues within. The recent explosion of data and the computing needs to handle it have given rise to systems that have to span numerous nodes. With such systems, the scope and number of unhandled conditions and error cases skyrocket. Debugging these systems needs different toolboxes, designs, and paradigms. In this lesson, we’ll explore some of these concepts and issues.
What are distributed systems?
Early computer systems, both hardware and software, created in the mid-20th century, were monolithic and centralized in nature. They consisted of a single, colossal machine with an enormous amount of computing power that performed computations and processed data within the confines of a solitary unit. A single machine was endowed with enough power for the workload, or rather, the workloads that were running at that time could be served by a well-endowed monolithic computer system of that time. As computational needs grew, centralized systems faced constraints in scalability, reliability, and performance. These limitations encompassed technical, economic, and practical aspects.
The high cost of building increasingly potent monolithic systems, combined with the demand for fault tolerance and effortless scalability, triggered the pursuit of a fresh approach—even before the advent of big data!
This pursuit eventually led to the rise of microservices architecture, marking a crucial development in distributed systems. Distributed systems represent a shift away from the centralized, monolithic model. They signify a natural evolution toward systems that are scalable, maintainable, and agile. This architectural approach divides applications into smaller, self-contained services that can be deployed and managed independently. Each microservice has a well-defined role and communicates with others through clear APIs. Typically, microservices are replicated for resiliency, distributed all over a network, and deployed in off-the-shelf cheaper hardware.
Distributed systems have become common. They are the norm today, and software development does not happen in any other context. In the following section, we’ll closely discuss distributed systems, the ...