Grokking the System Design Interview

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Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems

Key characteristics of a distributed system include Scalability, Reliability, Availability, Efficiency, and Manageability. Let's briefly review them:

Scalability

Scalability is the capability of a system, process, or a network to grow and manage increased demand. Any distributed system that can continuously evolve in order to support the growing amount of work is considered to be scalable.

A system may have to scale because of many reasons like increased data volume or increased amount of work, e.g., number of transactions

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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?