Introduction

Distributed Systems
Instructor: Kirema D.
Mutembei
[email protected]
e

0714 086 519

 Introduction

 Invention of high-speed computer

networks
 Local-area networks (LANs)

 Small amount of information, a few microseconds

 Large amount of information, at rate of 100 million

to 10 billion bits/sec

 Wide-area networks (WANs)

 64 Kbps to gigabits per second

 Consequently, it is easy to connect computer

systems via high speed networks
 DS: Definition (Tanenbaum and
van Steen)
Adistributed system is a
piece of software that
ensures that
 A collection of independent
computers appears to its
users as a single coherent
system.
 Distributed System:
 Two aspects:
(1) independent computers and
(2) single system ⇒ middleware
- Middleware is software that lies between
an operating system and the applications
running on it.
- Essentially functioning as hidden
translation layer, middleware enables
communication and data management for
distributed applications
 DS Definition: Lamport
 “You know you have one when
the crash of a computer you’ve
never heard of stops you from
getting any work done.”

 A distributed system is one

in which I cannot get
something done because a
machine I've never heard of
is down.
 Application Domains
 Finance and commerce – ebay,
amazon, paypal
 Information Society –www, search
engines, digital libraries
 Creative industries and
entertainment – online games like
massively multiplayer online game
(MMOG)
 Characteristics of a DS
 Multiple computers
 Concurrent execution
 Independent operation and failures
 Communications
 Ability to communicate
 No tight synchronization
 Relatively easy to expand or scale
 Transparency
 DS: Motivation
 Economics
 Share resources
 Relatively easy to expand or scale
 Speed – A distributed system may have more
total computing power than a mainframe.
 Cost
 Location Independence
 People and information are distributed
 Availability and Reliability
 If a machine crashes, the system as a whole
can survive.
 DS: Motivation cont’d
 Distributed system is a collection of loosely coupled processors
interconnected by a communications network.
 processors variously called nodes, computers, machines, hosts
 Site is location of the processor.
 Reasons for distributed systems
 Resource sharing
 Sharing and printing files at remote sites
 Processing information in a distributed database
 Using remote specialized hardware devices
 Computation speedup - load sharing
 Reliability - detect and recover from site failure, function transfer,
reintegrate failed site.
 Communication - message passing
 Distributed System Design Goals

1. Making resources available

The main goal of a distributed system is to make it
easy for users to access remote resources and to
share them with others in a controlled way.
It is cheaper to le a printer be shared by several
users than buying and maintaining printers for each
user.
Collaborating and exchanging information can be
made easier by connecting users and resource.
 Distributed System Design Goals cont’d

2. Distribution Transparency:
It is important for a distributed system to hide the
location of its process and resource. A distributed
system that can portray itself as a single system is
said to be transparent.
The various transparencies need to be considered
are access, location, migration, relocation,
replication, concurrency, failure and persistence.
Aiming for distributed transparency should be
considered along with performance issues.
 Distributed System Design Goals cont’d

3. Openness:
Openness is an important goal of distributed system
in which it offers services according to standard rules
that describe the syntax and semantics of those
services.
Open distributed system must be flexible making it
easy to configure and add new components without
affecting existing components.
An open distributed system must also be extensible.
 Distributed System Design Goals cont’d

4. Scalable:
Scalability is one of the most important goals which
are measured along three different dimensions.
First, a system can be scalable with respect to its size
which can add more user and resources to a system.
Second, users and resources can be geographically
apart.
Third, it is possible to manage even if many
administrative organizations are spanned.
 Distribution Transparency
 Transparency
 This is hiding the fact that its processes
and resources are physically distributed
across multiple computers
 A DS that is able to present itself to
users as if it were only on a single
computer system is said to be
transparent
 Note
 Distribution transparency is a nice a goal,
but achieving it is a different story.
Distribution Transparency
Transparency Description
Hide differences in data representation and how a
Access resource is accessed
Location Hide where a resource is located
Migration Hide that a resource may move to another location
Hide that a resource may be moved to another
Relocation location while in use
Hide that a resource may be shared by several
Replication competitive users
Hide that a resource may be shared by several
Concurrency competitive users
Failure Hide the failure and recovery of a resource
Hide whether a (software) resource is in memory or
Persistence on disk
 Degree of Transparency
 Aiming at full distribution transparency may be too
much:
 Users may be located in different continents
 Completely hiding failures of networks and nodes is
(theoretically and practically) impossible
 You cannot distinguish a slow computer from a failing
one
 You can never be sure that a server actually performed
an operation before a crash
 Full transparency will cost performance, exposing
distribution of the system
 Keeping Web caches exactly up-to-date with the
master
 Immediately flushing write operations to disk for fault
tolerance
 Openness of Distributed
Systems
 Goal: Open distributed system -- able to interact
with services from other open systems,
irrespective of the underlying environment:
 Standard rules (protocols/interfaces) to describe
services/components
 Interfaced definitions should be Complete & Vendor
neutral
 These help making system / services
interoperable & portable
 Flexibility – ability to integrate multiple components
 Achieving openness
 Achieving openness: At least make
the distributed system independent
from the underlying environment:
 Hardware
 Platforms
 Languages
 Scale in Distributed
Systems
 Observation: Many developers of modern
distributed system easily use the
adjective “scalable” without making
clear why their system actually scales.
 Three metrics of a scalable system:
 Number of users and/or processes (size
scalability)
 Maximum distance between nodes
(geographical scalability)
 Number of administrative domains
(administrative scalability)- used IDs, user
groups, ACLs, resource managers
 Scalability Limitations
 Centralized Services: Single server
for all users. Often necessary.
 Centralized Data: Single online
telephone book.
 Centralized Algorithms: Doing
routing based on complete
information.
 Scalability Issues
 Decentralized algorithms:
 No machine has complete
information about the system state.
 Machines make decisions based
only on local information.
 Failure of one machine does not
ruin the algorithm
 Scalability Issues cont’d
 Other issues with Geographical scalability
 Problems due to Synchronous
communication- sender will wait until the
acknowledgment is received from the receiver
and receiver waits until the message arrives.
 Unreliable WANs.
 Scaling the system across multiple
independent administrative domains.
 Conflicting policies w.r.t to resource
usage (payment), management and
security.
 Scaling Techniques
1. Partition data and
computations across multiple
machines
 Move computations to clients (Java
applets)
 Decentralized naming System (DNS)
 Decentralized information systems
(WWW)
2. Make copies of data available at
different machines (Servers)
 Replicated file servers (for fault tolerance)
 Replicated databases
 Mirrored web sites
DNS Structure
 Scaling Techniques cont’d
3. Allow client processes to access local
copies
 Attempts to reduce the network traffic of the previous
model by caching the data obtained from the server
node
 Web caches (browser/Web proxy)
 File caching (at server and client)

4. Hiding communication latencies

 Important to achieving geographical scalability- try to
avoid waiting for responses to remote service requests
 Reduce overall communication for interactive
applications.
Developing Distributed Systems:
Pitfalls
 Observation: Many distributed systems
are needlessly complex caused by
mistakes that required patching later
on.
 Many possible false assumptions:
 The network is reliable
 The network is secure
 The network is homogeneous- where all the
nodes have the same function in the network
 The topology does not change
 Developing Distributed
Systems: Pitfalls cont’d
 Bandwidth is infinite
 There is one administrator
 A common misconception among people when
discussing distributed systems is that it is
just another name for a network of
computers. However, this overlooks an
important distinction.
 A distributed system is built on top of a
network and tries to hide the existence of
multiple autonomous computers. It appears
as a single entity providing the user with
whatever services are required.
 Distributed System
Challenges
1. Heterogeneity
- Different programming languages use different representations
for characters and data structures such as arrays and records.
These differences must be addressed if programs written in
different languages are to be able to communicate with one
another

 networks;

 computer hardware;

 operating systems;

 programming languages;

 implementations by different developers.

 Distributed System
Challenges cont’d
2. Openness
-The openness of distributed systems is determined
primarily by the degree to which new resource-
sharing services can be added and be made
available for use by a variety of client programs.
-If the well-defined interfaces for a system are
published, it is easier for developers to add new
features or replace sub-systems in the future.
Example: Twitter has API that allows developers to
develop theirs own software interactively.
 Distributed System
Challenges cont’d
3. Scalability
A program is scalable if a program does not need
to be redesigned to ensure stability and consistent
performance as its workload increases.
As such, a program (distributed system in our
case) should not have a change in performance
regardless of whether it has 10 nodes or 100 nodes.
As a distributed system is scaled, several factors
need to be taken into account: size, geography, and
administration. The associated problem with size is
overloading.
 Distributed System
Challenges cont’d
3. Scalability Cont’d
Overloading refers to the degradation of the system that
refers as the system's workload increases (increase in
number of users, resourced consumed, etc.).

Secondly, with geography, as the distance that our

distributed system encompasses increases, the reliability
of our communication may break down.

Additionally, as a distributed system is scaled, we may

have to implement controls in the system; however, this
may devolve into what we can effectively call an
administrative mess.
 Distributed System
Challenges
4. Security
 Confidentiality - protection against
disclosure to unauthorized individuals
 Integrity - protection against alteration
or corruption
 Availability - protection against
interference with the means to access the
resources
 Firewalls, encryption techniques
Challenges - denial of service attacks,
security of mobile code (exes as
attachments)
 Distributed System
Challenges
5. Failure Handling
 Detecting failures e.g. checksums for
corrupt data
 Masking failures e.g. retransmissions
 Recovery from failures
 Redundancy e.g. use of RAID
Concurrency

Transparency

Quality of Service(QoS)
 Distributed System
Challenges
6. Transparency
 A problem with transparency may
arise with distributed systems due
to the nature of the system's
complexity.
 In this context, transparency refers
to the distributed system's ability to
conceal its complexity and give off
the appearance of a single system.
 And when we discuss transparency, we must also

discuss to what extent.

 Distributed System
Challenges
7. Concurrency
 This discusses the shared access of resources which must be

made available to the correct processes.

 Problems may arise when multiple processes attempt to access

the same resources at the same time, thus steps need to be

taken to ensure that any manipulation in the system remains
in a stable state; however the illusion of simultaneous
execution should be preserved.

 We refer to these preventative measure as concurrency

control.

 Concurrency control should be implemented to ensure that

processes are executed in a synchronous manner.