DevOps For Dummies



Chapter 20

Managing Distributed Systems

IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing microservices

Designing APIs

Running applications in containers

A distributed system is simply a collection of components networked across multiple computers. The components are independent (or at least should be), can fail without impacting other services, and work concurrently. Services communicate with each other through messaging formatted for a particular protocol (like hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP).

Decades ago, the server that hosted a company’s application often lived in a closet at the office. (A few of you might still have old remnants of hardware in office closets.) Now, the majority of companies are beginning to take advantage of pay-as-you-go cloud hosting. In large part, this move to cloud hosting is happening because running applications at scale requires efficient use of infrastructure. The costs of underutilizing hardware add up quickly.

Distributed systems have become the norm, mainly because of cloud services. Multitenancy allows multiple customers to take advantage of shared resources, which keeps costs low by maximizing the use of those ...