Summary

There a multiple motivations behind distributing systems. Despite certain introduced challenges and overheads in communication, performance, and organization, distribution is often necessary.

In order to design the system landscape, the system's context map that represents the individual responsibilities needs to be taken into consideration. It's advisable to design application APIs in clear, lean interfaces, ideally implemented with standard communication protocols. Before introducing breaking changes, engineers as well as business experts need to ask themselves whether it is necessary to force client functionality to stop working. In the same way, APIs should be designed in a resilient way, preventing unnecessary breaks, in other words: be conservative in what you do and liberal in what you accept.

Engineers that build distributed applications need to be aware of the trade-off between consistency and scalability. The majority of applications that use synchronous communication involving...