Designing Distributed Systems

Chapter 13. Conclusion: A New Beginning?

Every company, regardless of its origins, is becoming a digital company. This transformation requires the delivery of APIs and services to be consumed by mobile applications, devices in the internet of things (IoT), or even autonomous vehicles and systems. The increasing criticality of these systems means that it is necessary for these online systems to be built for redundancy, fault tolerance, and high availability. At the same time, the requirements of business necessitate rapid agility to develop and roll out new software, iterate on existing applications, or experiment with new user interfaces and APIs. The confluence of these requirements has led to an order of magnitude increase in the number of distributed systems that need to be built.

The task of building these systems is still far too difficult. The overall cost of developing, updating, and maintaining such a system is far too high. Likewise, the set of people with the capabilities and skills to build such applications is far too small to address the growing need.

Historically, when these situations presented themselves in software development and technology, new abstraction layers and patterns of software development emerged to make building software faster, easier, and more reliable. This first occurred with the development of the first compilers and programming languages. Later, the development of object-oriented programming languages and managed code occurred. Likewise, at ...