Slides for Chapter 1

Characterization of Distributed Systems

What are distributed systems?

“A distributed system is a
collection of independent
computers that appears to its
users as a single coherent
system”
(Tanenbaum & Steen, 2007; p2)
What are distributed systems?

Image from: https://www.ejbtutorial.com/distributed-systems/introduction-to-distributed-systems

Examples

• Networks
• When the ethernet was created in the 1970’s, it allowed individual computers
to send messages across the LAN
• Real-time systems
• Uses a mix of local and globally distributed systems that allows automation and
the monitoring of systems – Siemans use these for their wind turbines
• Distributed databases
• Most people’s first thought when they think about distributed systems. Allows
the data to be split across several servers and/or physical locations. Data can be
replicated or duplicated across systems
Figure 1.1 (see book for the full text)
Selected application domains and associated networked applications

Finance and commerce eCommerce e.g. Amazon and eBay, PayPal,

online banking and trading
The information society Web information and search engines, ebooks,
Wikipedia; social networking: Facebook and MySpace .
Creative industries and online gaming, music and film in the home, user-
entertainment generated content, e.g. YouTube, Flickr
Healthcare health informatics, on online patient records,
monitoring patients
Education e-learning, virtual learning environments;
distance learning
Transport and logistics GPS in route finding systems, map services:
Google Maps, Google Earth
Science The Grid as an enabling technology for
collaboration between scientists
Environmental management sensor technology to monitor earthquakes,
floods or tsunamis
5
Finance and commerce

The growth of ecommerce as exemplified by companies

such as Amazon and eBay, and underlying payments
technologies such as PayPal; the associated emergence of
online banking and trading and also complex information
dissemination systems for financial markets.
The information society

The growth of the World Wide Web as a repository of

information and knowledge; the development of web
search engines such as Google and Yahoo to search this
vast repository; the emergence of digital libraries and the
large-scale digitization of legacy information sources such
as books (for example, Google Books); the increasing
significance of user-generated content through sites such
as YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr; the emergence of social
networking through services such as Facebook and
MySpace.
Creative industries and entertainment

The emergence of online gaming as a novel and highly

interactive form of entertainment; the availability of
music and film in the home through networked media
centres and more widely in the Internet via downloadable
or streaming content; the role of user-generated content
(as mentioned above) as a new form of creativity, for
example via services such as YouTube; the creation of
new forms of art and enter tainment enabled by
emergent (including networked) technolog
Healthcare

The growth of health informatics as a discipline with its

emphasis on online electronic patient records and related
issues of privacy; the increasing role of telemedicine in
supporting remote diagnosis or more advanced services
such as remote surgery (including collaborative working
between healthcare teams); the increasing application of
networking and embedded systems technology in
assisted living, for example for monitoring the elderly in
their own homes.
Education

The emergence of e-learning through for example web-

based tools such as virtual learning environments;
associated support for distance learning; support for
collaborative or community-based learning.
Transport and logistics

The use of location technologies such as GPS in route

finding systems and more general traffic management
systems; the modern car itself as an example of a
complex distributed system (also applies to other forms
of transport such as aircraft); the development of web-
based map services such as MapQuest, Google Maps and
Google Earth.
Figure 1.2
An example financial trading system

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
12
Trends in distributed systems

Distributed systems are undergoing a period of significant

change and this can be traced back to a number of influential
trends:
• The emergence of pervasive networking technology;
• The emergence of ubiquitous computing coupled with the desire to
support user mobility in distributed systems;
• The increasing demand for multimedia services;
• The view of distributed systems as a utility.
Figure 1.3
A typical portion of the Internet

intranet ☎
☎
☎ ISP

backbone

satellite link

desktop computer:
server:
network link:
Mobile and ubiquitous computing

• Laptop computers.
• Handheld devices, including mobile phones, smart phones, GPS-
enabled devices, pagers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), video
cameras and digital cameras.
• Wearable devices, such as smart watches with functionality
similar to a PDA.
• Devices embedded in appliances such as washing machines, hi-
fi systems, cars and refrigerators.
Figure 1.4
Portable and handheld devices in a distributed system
Distributed multimedia systems
• providing support for an (extensible) range of encoding and
encryption formats, such as the MPEG series of standards
(including for example the popular MP3 standard otherwise
known as MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3) and HDTV;
• providing a range of mechanisms to ensure that the desired
quality of service can be met;
• providing associated resource management strategies, including
appropriate scheduling policies to support the desired quality of
service;
• providing adaptation strategies to deal with the inevitable
situation in open systems where quality of service cannot be met
or sustained
Distributed computing as a utility
• Physical resources such as storage and processing can be made
available to networked computers, removing the need to own
such resources on their own. At one end of the spectrum, a user
may opt for a remote storage facility for file storage requirements

• Software services (as defined in Section 1.4) can also be made

available across the global Internet using this approach. Indeed,
many companies now offer a comprehensive range of services for
effective rental, including services such as email and distributed
calendars. Google, for example, bundles a range of business
services under the banner Google Apps [www.google.com I].
Figure 1.5
Cloud computing

19
Challenges
The examples in Section 1.2 are intended to
illustrate the scope of distributed systems and to
suggest the issues that arise in their design. In
many of them, significant challenges were
encountered and overcome. As the scope and
scale of distributed systems and applications is
extended the same and other challenges are likely
to be encountered.
Challenges
The challenges are listed below.
• Heterogeneity
• Openness
• Security
• Scalability
• Failure handling
• Concurrency
• Transparency
• Quality of service
Heterogeneity
The Internet enables users to access services and run applications
over a heterogeneous collection of computers and networks.
Heterogeneity (that is, variety and difference) applies to all of the
following:

• networks;
• computer hardware;
• operating systems;
• programming languages;
• implementations by different developers
Openness
• Open systems are characterized by the fact that
their key interfaces are published.
• Open distributed systems are based on the
provision of a uniform communication mechanism
and published interfaces for access to shared
resources.
• Open distributed systems can be constructed
from heterogeneous hardware and software,
possibly from different vendors. But the
conformance of each component to the published
standard must be carefully tested and verified if
the system is to work correctly.
Security
Denial of service attacks.
Another security problem is that a user may wish to disrupt a
service for some reason. This can be achieved by bombarding the
service with such a large number of pointless requests that the
serious users are unable to use it.
Security of mobile code.
Mobile code needs to be handled with care. Consider someone
who receives an executable program as an electronic mail
attachment: the possible effects of running the program are
unpredictable;
Scalability
Controlling the cost of physical resources.
As the demand for a resource grows, it should be
possible to extend the system, at reasonable cost, to
meet it. For example, the frequency with which files
are accessed in an intranet is likely to grow as the
number of users and computers increases.
Controlling the performance loss.
Consider the management of a set of data whose size is
proportional to the number of users or resources in the
system.
Scalability
Preventing software resources running out.
An example of lack of scalability is shown by the numbers used
as Internet (IP) addresses (computer addresses in the
Internet).
Avoiding performance bottlenecks.
In general, algorithms should be decentralized to avoid having
performance bottlenecks. We illustrate this point with
reference to the predecessor of the Domain Name System, in
which the name table was kept in a single master file that
could be downloaded to any computers that needed it.
Figure 1.6
Growth of the Internet (computers and web servers)

Date Computers Web servers Percentage

1993, July 1,776,000 130 0.008

1995, July 6,642,000 23,500 0.4
1997, July 19,540,000 1,203,096 6
1999, July 56,218,000 6,598,697 12
2001, July 125,888,197 31,299,592 25
2003, July ~200,000,000 42,298,371 21
2005, July 353,284,187 67,571,581 19
Failure handling
Detecting failures: Some failures can be detected. For example,
checksums can be used to detect corrupted data in a message or
a file.
Masking failures: Some failures that have been detected can
be hidden or made less severe.
Two examples of hiding failures:
1. Messages can be retransmitted when they fail to arrive.
2. File data can be written to a pair of disks so that if one is
corrupted, the other may still be correct.
Failure handling
Tolerating failures: Most of the services in the Internet do exhibit
failures – it would not be practical for them to attempt to detect
and hide all of the failures that might occur in such a large
network with so many components. Their clients can be designed
to tolerate failures, which generally involves the users tolerating
them as well.
Recovery from failures: Recovery involves the design of software
so that the state of permanent data can be recovered or ‘rolled
back’ after a server has crashed.
Failure handling
Redundancy.
Services can be made to tolerate failures by the use of redundant
components.
Consider the following examples:
1. There should always be at least two different routes between any
two routers in the Internet.
2. 2. In the Domain Name System, every name table is replicated in at
least two different servers.
3. 3. A database may be replicated in several servers to ensure that the
data remains accessible after the failure of any single server; the
servers can be designed to detect faults in their peers; when a fault is
detected in one server, clients are redirected to the remaining
servers.
Concurrency
Both services and applications provide resources that can
be shared by clients in a distributed system. There is
therefore a possibility that several clients will attempt to
access a shared resource at the same time.
Section 1.5.7
Transparencies

Access transparency: enables local and remote resources to be accessed using identical
operations.
Location transparency: enables resources to be accessed without knowledge of their physical
or network location (for example, which building or IP address).
Concurrency transparency: enables several processes to operate concurrently using shared
resources without interference between them.
Replication transparency: enables multiple instances of resources to be used to increase
reliability and performance without knowledge of the replicas by users or application
programmers.
Failure transparency: enables the concealment of faults, allowing users and application
programs to complete their tasks despite the failure of hardware or software components.
Mobility transparency: allows the movement of resources and clients within a system
without affecting the operation of users or programs.
Performance transparency: allows the system to be reconfigured to improve performance
as loads vary.
Scaling transparency: allows the system and applications to expand in scale without change
to the system structure or the application algorithms.
Quality of service
The main non-functional properties of systems that affect the
quality of the service experienced by clients and users are

• Reliability
• Security
• Performance
• Adaptability
Figure 1.7
Web servers and web browsers

Web servers Browsers

http://www.google.comlsearch?q=obama
www.google.com

www.cdk5.net Internet
http://www.cdk5.net/

www.w3c.org

File system of http://www.w3.org/standards/faq.html#conformance

www.w3c.org standards

faq.html

Instructor’s Guide for Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design Edn. 5
© Pearson Education 2012
Summary
Distributed systems are everywhere. The Internet enables users
throughout the world to access its services wherever they may be
located. Each organization manages an intranet, which provides
local services and Internet services for local users and generally
provides services to other users in the Internet. Small distributed
systems can be constructed from mobile computers and other
small computational devices that are attached to a wireless
network.
Resource sharing is the main motivating factor for constructing
distributed systems. Resources such as printers, files, web pages
or database records are managed by servers of the appropriate
type. For example, web servers manage web pages and other
web resources. Resources are accessed by clients – for example,
the clients of web servers are generally called browsers
Question ?