DESIGN ISSUES IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM
Distributed systems offer numerous advantages but also come with inherent design challenges.
- Heterogeneity: Distributed systems often involve components with varying hardware architectures, operating systems, and software implementations. This heterogeneity can lead to compatibility issues, complicate development, and require careful design to ensure all components work together seamlessly.
- Concurrency Control: Multiple processes may try to access and modify shared data concurrently in a distributed system. Designing mechanisms to ensure data consistency and prevent conflicts like race conditions is a crucial challenge.
- Scalability Bottlenecks: While distributed systems are generally scalable, certain components can become bottlenecks if not designed carefully. Centralized resources or single points of failure can limit the ability to scale effectively.
- Communication Overhead: Communication between nodes across a network is essential in distributed systems, but excessive communication can lead to performance degradation. Optimizing communication protocols and minimizing message passing are important design considerations.
- Failure Handling and Fault Tolerance: Failures are inevitable in any system, but distributed systems require robust mechanisms to handle failures gracefully. This includes fault detection, isolation, recovery, and failover mechanisms to ensure the system remains operational even with component failures.
- Security Threats: Distributed systems have a larger attack surface due to their dispersed nature. Security measures like encryption, authentication, and access control need to be carefully designed and implemented to protect against cyberattacks and unauthorized access.
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