- Model question
Challenges of DS with example
Short answer
Distributed components have no shared memory or clock, communicate by messages that may be delayed or lost, fail independently, and are heterogeneous. This makes transparency, openness, security, scalability, failure handling, concurrency, and quality of service harder than in a single computer, causing partial failures, bottlenecks, and network delays.
Why are there challenges in achieving some requirements of a distributed system? Explain the challenges associated with different requirements of distributed system.
Why challenges arise
A distributed system gets its benefits (sharing, scalability, reliability) from many independent computers joined by a network. But these have no shared memory or clock, communicate by messages that can be delayed or lost, fail independently, and differ in hardware and software. Therefore requirements such as transparency, openness or fault tolerance cannot be achieved as easily as in a single computer.
Challenges for different requirements
| Requirement | Challenge | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Heterogeneity | Different networks, OS, hardware, languages and data formats | Windows client with Linux server; solved by middleware, XDR |
| Openness | Published, standard and extensible interfaces | Web services described by WSDL / IDL |
| Security | Open networks; attacks on confidentiality, integrity, availability | Banking requires TLS, authentication |
| Scalability | Bottlenecks in servers, tables and algorithms; physical limits | DNS uses hierarchy and caching to scale |
| Failure handling | Partial and independent failure; cannot tell slow from failed | Replicated servers, retries, checkpoints |
| Concurrency | Shared data used by many clients | Seat booking with locks / transactions |
| Transparency | Delay and failure cannot be fully hidden | Remote call is slower than local |
| Quality of service | Timeliness and reliability on shared networks | Video streaming needs bounded jitter |
✓ Answer checked by Claude Opus 5.5 (high effort)
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