Since their first introduction many decades ago, we learnt that distributed systems enable use cases we couldn’t even think about before them, but they also introduce all sorts of new issues.
When these systems were rare and simple, engineers dealt with the added complexity by minimising the number of remote interactions. The safest way to handle distribution has been to avoid it as much as possible, even if that meant duplicated logic and data across various systems.
But our needs as an industry pushed us even further, from a few larger central computers to hundreds and thousands of small services. In this new world, we’ve had to start taking our head out of the sand and tackling the new challenges and open questions, first with ad-hoc solutions done in a case-by-case manner and subsequently with something more sophisticated. As it often happens with technology, we have first found ad-hoc solutions in a case-by-case manner. As we find out more about the problem domain and design better solutions, we start crystallising some of the most common needs into patterns, libraries, and eventually platforms.
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