"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
- Leslie Lamport
The master/worker pattern is a popular approach for building fault-tolerant, distributed systems. The first part of this chapter explores this pattern in depth with a focus on some of the more challenging aspects of distributed systems, such as node discovery and error handling.
In the second part of this chapter, we will apply the master/worker pattern to build, from scratch, a distributed graph-processing system that can handle massive graphs whose size exceeds the memory capacity of most modern compute nodes. Finally, in the last part of this chapter, we will apply everything learned so far to create a distributed version of the PageRank calculator service for the Links...
