Basic Distributed Systems Concepts
A concise overview of the foundational ideas you will reuse throughout the guide: latency vs throughput, concurrency and coordination, reliability under partial failures, time and clocks, idempotency, and the CAP/PACELC trade‑offs. Use this page as a mental map before diving into topic articles.
When you discuss latency budgets, queueing, or fan‑out, cross‑reference Quality Attributes. For coordination and connectors, pair this with System Thinking Basics. For runtime hardening (timeouts, retries, jitter, circuit breakers), see Reliability Patterns and related topics in Distributed Systems & Microservices.
What’s in scope
- Latency, throughput, and bandwidth basics with intuition for trade‑offs.
- Concurrency vs parallelism and why synchronization is required.
- Reliability under partial failure; how timeouts and backoffs shape behavior.
- Idempotency and at‑least‑once delivery realities.
- Big‑picture consistency trade‑offs (CAP, PACELC) and where to learn more.
Mental model
How to use this section
- Start with the intuition for Latency, Throughput, Bandwidth and relate it to your performance budgets in Quality Attributes.
- Contrast Concurrency, Parallelism, Synchronization with your platform’s primitives (locks, semaphores, optimistic concurrency).
- Ground reliability discussions in concrete mechanisms: timeouts, retries, backoff. Assume at‑least‑once; design for idempotency at boundaries.
- Use this page as a hub, then continue to deeper articles like CAP & PACELC and Consistency Models & Trade‑offs.
Common pitfalls
- Treating retries as harmless without idempotency or deduplication.
- Using tight timeouts everywhere; amplify cascading failures and thundering herds.
- Over‑synchronization that caps throughput; under‑synchronization that corrupts state.
- Mixing consistency assumptions across services without explicit contracts.
Related topics
- System Thinking Basics
- Quality Attributes
- Reliability Patterns
- Distributed Systems & Microservices
- Consistency Models & Trade‑offs
📄️ Latency, Throughput, Bandwidth
Clear definitions, interactions, and practical tuning to hit latency SLOs without sacrificing throughput.
📄️ Concurrency, Parallelism, Synchronization
Practical distinctions, decision flows, and patterns to combine concurrency, parallelism, and synchronization safely.