Chapter 1: An Introduction to Distributed Applications
In today's world of digital platforms, all applications are expected to be highly scalable, available, and reliable with world-class performance. Many IT companies use the term ARP, which stands for availability, reliability, performance, and have a guaranteed service-level agreement (SLA) for each. Any SLA below 99.99% (four nines) is not acceptable for an application given the challenging and highly competitive world we are in. Some mission-critical applications guarantee a higher SLA of >=99.999% (five nines). To meet increasing user demands and requirements, an application needs to be highly scalable and distributed.
Distributed applications are applications/programs that run on multiple computers and communicate with each other through a well-defined interface over a network to process data and achieve the desired output. While they appear to be one application from the end user's perspective, distributed applications typically have multiple components.
This chapter will cover the following:
- Monolithic applications versus distributed applications
- Challenges with distributed applications
- Designing your application for scalability
- Designing your application for high availability
