Distribution System Practice Series
Introduction A distribution system is a collection of independent computers in terms of hardware but communicating and coordinating with each other through a computer network, making end users feel like a single centralized system. In the era of big data and cloud computing, distributed architecture plays a backbone role for almost all large-scale online services. Core Characteristics For a system to be considered truly distributed, it must face and solve the following technical characteristics: No Shared Clock : Each node has its own physical clock and there is always a certain clock drift. Therefore, you cannot rely on absolute real time to determine the order of events happening between nodes. No Shared Memory : Nodes cannot directly read or write to each other's RAM. Every communication activity and state synchronization must be done through message passing such as protocols like HTTP/REST, gRPC or message brokers like Kafka, RabbitMQ. Concurrency : Multiple nodes process indep...