Learn Distributed Systems through Real Life Distributed Systems Examples: Part 1

Let’s consider you are a small convenient store owner in a small town with rough population of 100 people. I know, I know what you might be thinking right now that I wanted to understand something about distributed systems and I am not interested in being grocery store owner but please stick with me for few more mins.

Let’s assume you have only one small counter in your store where you store everything(inventory) and serve(sell) around 20 people daily, nothing serious and now you are wondering how this is related to distributed systems at all and here is how.

Simple Client Server System

What we just covered is simple client server application where store counter act as a server in which both application and database is hosted in one small machine and people act as client which we serve/sell.

Now let’s assume that your town population has increased to 500 people after few years and your small store serving around 50 customers daily and you can serve/sell more but some customers are really frustrated due to items not available that’s why you are losing their business. Compare this to the system, clients are experiencing slowness, timeouts and doesn’t want to return to your website again. You really need to do something quickly but what do you do? Let me give you a hint 😊 which you already know, build bigger counter for your store, add more CPU and Memory to your single server for system and that’s called the vertical scaling 😊. Your downtime is really how long it takes you to build bigger counter and in systems, its really how long it takes you to add more CPU and memory.

Same system as above with higher capacity

Your clients are happy and you are seeing more traffic so Please stay tune for the next chapters to learn more about distributes systems through real life distributed systems examples.