Distributed Systems

External

• O'Reilly Safari - Distributed Systems in One Lesson by Tim Berglund

Internal

• Software Architecture
• System Design

Distributed System Definition

According to Andrew Tannenbaum, a distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appear to their users as one computer. Specifically, there are three specific characteristics any distributed system must have:

• The computers operate concurrently
• The computers fail independently. They will fail, sooner or later.
• The computers do not share a global clock. All activities these computers perform are asynchronous with respect to the other components. This is a very important characteristics, as it imposes some essential limitations on what the distributed system can do.

Distributed Storage

Relational databases.

Non-relational databases.

Cassandra

Distributed file systems.