Introduction

Most Interesting Applications Can No Longer Be Executed in Isolation

Modern applications are built from many components that cooperate to get things done.

Applications have changed.

Marc Andreessen has famously said “software is eating the world.” Software is at the heart of almost every thing we do. As a result, applications have gotten more complex.

Almost none of the applications on your phone can do anything without talking to other computers—backend servers, as they’re sometimes called.

Similarly, most Web applications are actually multiple cooperating processes.

Even desktop applications like Word or your calendar use networked services.

The rise of cloud computing is evidence of the importance of distributed systems in modern computer applications.

Lesson Objectives

This lesson is primarily an introduction to why we want to study distributed systems.

After completing this lesson, you should be able to:

Describe the motivations for building distributed systems
Distinguish distributed systems from other programming models
Explain the significance of latency in distributed systems
Describe the primary benefits of distributed systems

Reading

Read, view or listen to the following:

Why Distributed Systems? (Lesson Slidedoc) - PDF
A New Soft Technology
Raging Bulls: How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading
Honeybee Decision Making (there's also an 8 minute video on this topic)