Challenges with distributed applications

When you start developing distributed applications, you will run into the following common set of challenges that all developers face:

• Design and implementation
• Data management
• Messaging

Design and implementation

The decisions made during the design and implementation phase are very important. There are several challenges, such as designing for high availability and scalability. Some design changes in the later stages of the project might incur huge costs in terms of changes to development, testing, and so on, depending on the nature of the change. Hence, it is very important to arrive at the right design choices at the beginning.

Data management

As data is spread across different regions and servers in distributed applications, there are several challenges, such as data availability, maintaining data consistency in different locations across multiple servers, optimizing your queries and data store for good performance, caching, security, and many more.

Messaging

As all components are loosely coupled in distributed applications, asynchronous messaging will be widely used for functionalities such as sending emails, uploading files, and so on. The user doesn't have to wait for these operations to be completed as these can happen asynchronously in the background and then send notifications to the user on completion. While there are several benefits, such as high performance, better scaling, and so on, there are several challenges as well with asynchronous messaging, such as handling large messages, processing messages in a defined order, idempotency, handling failed messages, and many more.

In the next section, we will see how to design applications for scalability.