Chapter 9

Here are some sample answers to the questions presented in this chapter:

1. In a distributed application architecture, every piece of the software and infrastructure needs to be redundant in a production environment, where the continuous uptime of the application is mission-critical. A highly distributed application consists of many parts and the likelihood of one of the pieces failing or misbehaving increases with the number of parts. It is guaranteed that, given enough time, every part will eventually fail. To avoid outages of the application, we need redundancy in every part, be it a server, a network switch, or a service running on a cluster node in a container.

 

2. In highly distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant systems, individual services of the application can move around due to scaling needs or due to component failures. Thus, we cannot hardwire different...