Designing Distributed Systems

Chapter 7. Scatter/Gather

So far we’ve examined systems that replicate for scalability in terms of the number of requests processed per second (the stateless replicated pattern), as well as scalability for the size of the data (the sharded data pattern). In this chapter we introduce the scatter/gather pattern, which uses replication for scalability in terms of time. Specifically, the scatter/gather pattern allows you to achieve parallelism in servicing requests, enabling you to service them significantly faster than you could if you had to service them sequentially.

Like replicated and sharded systems, the scatter/gather pattern is a tree pattern with a root that distributes requests and leaves that process those requests. However, in contrast to replicated and sharded systems, with scatter/gather requests are simultaneously farmed out to all of the replicas in the system. Each replica does a small amount of processing and then returns a fraction of the result to the root. The root server then combines the various partial results together to form a single complete response to the request and then sends this request back out to the client. The scatter/gather pattern is illustrated in Figure 7-1.

Scatter/gather is quite useful when you have a large amount of mostly independent processing that is needed to handle a particular request. Scatter/gather can be seen as sharding the computation necessary to service the request, rather than sharding the data (although data sharding may ...