Communication Protocols in Distributed Systems
Communication Protocols in Distributed Systems Distributed systems rely on multiple machines that must coordinate. The choice of communication protocol affects how quickly data moves, what can fail gracefully, and how easy it is to evolve the system. A simple decision here saves many problems later. Types of communication patterns Request-response: a client asks a service and waits for a reply. Publish-subscribe: events or messages are delivered to many subscribers. Message queues: work items flow through a broker with buffering and retries. Streaming: long-running data flow, useful for logs or real-time feeds. These patterns can be combined. For example, a backend may use gRPC for fast request-response and a message broker to handle background tasks. ...