What Is a Distributed System?
A collection of independent computers that appear to its users as one computer - Andrew Tannenbaum Life was simple when business applications ran on a single server, connected to a single database sitting on a rack in the basement of a company’s office. Everything was local, contained, and relatively easy to reason about. But that model doesn’t hold up anymore. As businesses evolved and data became central to every function — from dashboards to machine learning — the demands on infrastructure grew exponentially. Datasets ballooned in size. It became impractical, even impossible, to store and process everything on a single machine. ...