Goals of distributed system | Distributed Systems

What is Distributed System?

Before going to understand, Goals of distributed systems firstly we need to talk about Distributed system. so

Distributed Systems is a collection of autonomous computer systems that are physically separated but are connected by a centralized computer network Appear as a single coherent system to the end user.

Goals of distributed system:-

Just because it is possible to build distributed systems does not necessarily mean that it is a good idea. After all, with current technology it is also possible to put four floppy disk drives on a personal computer. It is just that doing so would be pointless. In this section we discuss four important goals that should be met to make building a distributed system worth the effort. A distributed system should make resources easily accessible; it should reasonably hide the fact that resources are distributed across a network; it should be open and it should be scalable.

There are mainly four goals of distributed systems

• Making Easily Accessible Resources
• Transparency
• Openness
• Scalable

Making Resources Accessible:-

The main goal of a distributed system is to make it easy for the users (and applications) to access remote resources, and to share them in a controlled and efficient way. Resources can be just about anything, but typical examples include things like printers, computers, storage facilities, data, files, Web pages, and networks, to name just a few. There are many reasons for wanting to share resources. One obvious reason is that of economics. For example, it is cheaper to let a printer be shared by several users in a small office than having to buy and maintain a separate printer for each user. Likewise, it makes economic sense to share costly resources such as supercomputers, high-performance storage systems, image setters, and other expensive peripherals.
However, as connectivity and sharing increase, security is becoming increasingly important. In current practice, systems provide little protection against eavesdropping.

Distribution Transparency:-

An important goal of a distributed system is to hide the fact that its processes and resources are physically distributed across multiple computers. A distributed system that is able to present itself to users and applications as if it were only a single computer system is said to be transparent. Let us first take a look at what kinds of transparency exist in distributed systems. Types of Transparency The concept of transparency can be applied to several aspects of a distributed system, the most important ones shown in Fig. 1-2.


The conclusion is that aiming for distribution transparency may be a nice goal when designing and implementing distributed systems, but that it should be considered together with other issues such as performance and comprehensibility. The price for not being able to achieve full transparency may be surprisingly high.

Openness :-

Another important goal of distributed systems is openness. An open distributed system is a system that offers services according to standard rules that describe the syntax and semantics of those services. For example, in computer networks, standard rules govern the format, contents, and meaning of messages sent and received. Such rules are formalized in protocols. In distributed systems, services are generally specified through interfaces, which are often described in an Interface Definition Language (IDL). Interface definitions written in an IDL nearly always capture only the syntax of services. In other words, they specify precisely the names of the functions that are available together with types of the parameters, return values, possible exceptions that can be raised, and so on. The hard part is specifying precisely what those services do, that is, the semantics of interfaces. In practice, such specifications are always given in an informal way by means of natural language.
Another important goal for an open distributed system is that it should be easy to configure the system out of different components (possibly from different developers). Also, it should be easy to add new components or replace existing ones without affecting those components that stay in place. In other words, an open distributed system should also be extensible. For example, in an extensible system, it should be relatively easy to add parts that run on a different operating system. or even to replace an entire file system. As many of us know from daily practice, attaining such flexibility is easier said than done.

Scalability:-

Worldwide connectivity through the Internet is rapidly becoming as common as being able to send a postcard to anyone anywhere around the world. With this in mind, scalability is one of the most important design goals for developers of distributed systems. Scalability of a system can be measured along at least three different dimensions . First, a system can be scalable with respect to its size, meaning that we can easily add more users and resources to the system. Second, a geographically scalable system is one in which the users and resources may lie far apart. Third, a system can be administratively scalable, meaning that it can still be easy to manage even if it spans many independent administrative organizations. Unfortunately, a system that is scalable in one or more of these dimensions often exhibits some loss of performance as the system scales up.


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