How can you explain distributed systems to someone with an operating systems background?

3 What are the challenges of distributed systems?

Designing, implementing, and maintaining distributed systems is a difficult task due to the inherent characteristics of the network and nodes. Partial failure, concurrency, latency, and security are some of the common challenges they face. Partial failure means that some nodes or links may fail while others continue to operate, making it hard to detect and handle failures. Concurrency can lead to conflicts and inconsistencies among the nodes, necessitating coordination and synchronization mechanisms. Latency can affect performance and responsiveness of the system, as well as introduce uncertainty and ambiguity in its state. Finally, security measures such as encryption, authentication, and authorization are required to protect the system from malicious threats.

4 What are the principles of distributed systems?

In order to effectively tackle the issues associated with distributed systems, there are various principles and guidelines that can be used in the design and implementation stages. Abstraction is one such principle, which simplifies usage and development by providing a uniform interface that hides the complexity and heterogeneity of the system. Transparency is another principle that makes the system appear and behave as if it were a single-node system, despite being composed of multiple nodes. Lastly, modularity divides the system into smaller components that are independent from each other, allowing for better maintainability and scalability. For example, a distributed file system can use abstraction to hide the details of file storage and replication, a distributed database can provide transactional transparency, and a distributed web application can use a microservice architecture with loosely coupled services.

5 What are the examples of distributed systems?

Distributed systems are used in many domains and applications. Cloud computing, for example, provides on-demand access to computing resources and services over the internet. It can offer infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Peer-to-peer networks are another type of distributed system, which consists of nodes that share their resources and data with each other without a centralized authority. Additionally, distributed algorithms are algorithms that run on multiple nodes of a distributed system and coordinate with each other to achieve a common goal. These algorithms can solve problems such as consensus, leader election, distributed locking, and distributed sorting, which are essential for the functionality and performance of distributed systems.