Introduction to Distributed Systems

Distributed systems have changed the face of the world. When your web browser connects to a web server somewhere else on the planet, it is participating in what seems to be a simple form of a client/server distributed system. When you contact a modern web service such as Google or Facebook, you are not just interacting with a single machine, however. Behind the scenes, these complex services are built from a large collection (i.e., thousands) of machines, each of which cooperate to provide the particular service of the site. Thus, it should be clear what makes ...