Challenges of distribution

With all these motivations, especially technical ones such as scalability, why shouldn't engineers distribute everything then? Distribution comes with certain overheads.

In general, the overall overhead that comes on top of the system's distilled business logic will be multiplied by the number of applications involved. For example, a single, monolithic application requires a monitoring solution. Distributing this application will cause all resulting applications to be monitored as well.

Communication overhead

In distribution, first of all, there is an overhead cost in communicating between systems.

Technology is very effective in communicating within a single process. There is effectively no overhead in calling functionality that is part of the application. As soon as inter-process or remote communication is required, engineers have to define interface abstractions. Communication protocols such as HTTP have to be defined and used in order to exchange information.

This...