Grokking the System Design Interview
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Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems

A distributed system is a group of computers that work together. To the person using it, it looks like one system.

When you design one, you have to say how good it must be. Five words are used to describe this: scalability, reliability, availability, efficiency, and manageability.

This lesson explains each word. For each one you will see what it means, a small example, and how it is measured.

Scalability

Scalability means the system can handle more work when you give it more resources.

Imagine a website with 1,000 users today and 1 million users next year

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Marvin Xu

· 4 years ago

I disagree on all systems that are reliable are available. For example the stock market is considered reliable but not very available since it doesn't operate at all hours. This is because something that does what it's expected to do is reliable even if it's not available. If it's not expected to be available 24/7 it can still be considered reliable since it hasn't failed to meet the expectations set.

I propose to redefine reliability as how much a system meets expectations.

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Utkarsh Gupta

· 3 years ago

I think MySQL also allows to scale horizontally if you use it in a cluster mode. Isn't it?