What is a distributed system?
A distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appear to the user as a single coherent system.
To accomplish a common objective, the computers in a distributed system communicate with one another. A distributed system’s computers may be housed in one physical place or dispersed across several regions. The main benefit of a distributed system is that it can outperform a single computer system in terms of performance, reliability and availability.
It involves sharing resources and processing power among several workstations through distributed computing and databases. The key components of distributed systems are multiple nodes, communication networks and distributed middleware that controls communication between nodes.
Nodes are independent computing entities that communicate with each other. A communication network acts as a medium for exchanging information between nodes. Distributed middleware in distributed systems refers to the software layer between the distributed applications and the underlying network infrastructure, providing services such as communication, coordination, and resource management to enable efficient and reliable distributed computing.
By distributing the workload and data across several nodes, the architecture of distributed systems is created to achieve fault tolerance (the ability to continue operating in the presence of node failures or network problems), scalability and high availability.