- Published on
System Design: Distributed Systems
- Authors
- Name
- Loi Tran
Introduction
To build a distributed system, you need to understand and make trade-offs between:
- Scalability: How well the system handles increasing load. Use techniques like horizontal scaling, sharding, and load balancing.
- Availability: Ensure the system continues to function even when parts fail. Use redundancy, replication, and failover strategies.
- Consistency: Keep data synchronized across nodes. Apply techniques like consensus protocols (e.g., Raft, Paxos) and distributed transactions.
- Partition Tolerance: Handle network failures that split the system. According to the CAP theorem, a distributed system must sacrifice either consistency or availability in such scenarios.
Other important concepts include:
- Data partitioning and replication
- Service discovery
- Eventual consistency
- Distributed caching
- Rate limiting and backpressure
- Monitoring and observability
Building a distributed system involves designing with failure as a given, optimizing for communication over unreliable networks, and ensuring the system degrades gracefully under stress.