A distributed system defined

A little bit deviated from the major objective, but very much related.

A distributed system is a complex application designed to run on a network and such a system has multiple processes to do something. Network applications are different from distributed applications. The difference is, in a network application the autonomous computers are explicitly visible and have to be explicitly addressed. That is, you exactly know to which computer you talk to. In a distributed system the existence of multiple autonomous computers is transparent. At the same time a distributed system is spread-out and de-centralized.

Here I quote some of the well-known definitions on distributed systems.

“A system in which hardware and software components located at networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions only by message passing” - Coulouris

“A distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appear to the users of the computer as a single coherent system” – Tanenbaum

“A distributed system is one on which I cannot get any work done because some machine that I have never heard of has crashed” - Lamport