Distributed Systems

Abstract

Chapter 5 considers distributed systems by their properties. The first section studies the classification of software systems, which is usually distinguished in centralized, decentralized and distributed systems. It studies the differences between these three major approaches, showing there is a rather multidimensional classification instead of a linear one. The most important case are distributed systems that enable spreading of computational tasks across several autonomous, independently acting computational entities. A very important result of this case is the CAP theorem that considers the trade-off between consistency, availability and partition tolerance. The last section deals with the possibility to reach consensus in distributed systems, discussing how fault tolerant consensus mechanisms enable mutual agreement among the individual entities in presence of failures. One very special case are so-called Byzantine failures that are discussed in great detail. The main result is the so-called FLP Impossibility Result which states that there is no deterministic algorithm that guarantees solution to the consensus problem in the asynchronous case. The chapter concludes by considering practical solutions that circumvent the impossibility result in order to reach consensus.