Challenges of Distributed Systems

Here are some of the key challenges:

• Network Complexity: Distributed systems rely on network communication between nodes, which introduces complexity and overhead. Managing network latency, bandwidth limitations, and packet loss can be challenging, particularly in large-scale deployments spanning multiple geographic locations.
• Consistency and Coordination: Maintaining data consistency across distributed nodes is challenging due to the possibility of concurrent updates and network partitions. Achieving strong consistency requires coordination mechanisms like distributed transactions and consensus protocols, which can introduce latency and overhead.
• Fault Tolerance: Distributed systems must be resilient to hardware failures, software bugs, and network issues. Implementing fault tolerance mechanisms, such as replication, redundancy, and failure detection, adds complexity and overhead to the system architecture.
• Concurrency Control: Coordinating concurrent access to shared resources in a distributed environment is challenging. Distributed systems must implement efficient concurrency control mechanisms to prevent data corruption, race conditions, and deadlocks while maximizing throughput and performance.
• Security: Distributed systems face various security threats, including unauthorized access, data breaches, and denial-of-service attacks. Securing communication channels, authenticating users and nodes, and implementing access control policies are critical to protecting sensitive data and ensuring system integrity.

Distributed systems are the key technological component of modern information and communications technology. These are such that different computers work on specific tasks simultaneously but as if they functioned as a single entity. It enables effective parallel processing, upgrade of system capacity, and performance redundancy, which are currently in practice.