Distributed System Design Best Practices

Achieving Component Isolation in Distributed Systems

Question

An architect is asked to design a solution for a distributed system in which the system's components operate in a way that components of one system do not negatively impact other components of the system. Which of the below listed architectural best practice can help to achieve this?

Answers

Explanations

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A. B. C. D.

Answer: D.

The scenario in the question talks about a distributed system wherein there is minimal-to-no dependency amongst the components.

This can be achieved by implementing loose coupling amongst the components.

Request throttling, and, use of stateless services (Option A, B) help design resilient solution for distributed system that can withstand failures and can recover from failure quickly.

Enabling automatic data backup (Option C) is the best practice for failure management, as backups aligned with requirements will ensure the required recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).

Option A is INCORRECT because the scenario refers to ensure minimal dependency amongst the components.

Request throttling does not ensure minimal dependency but helps build a resilient solution.

Option B is INCORRECT because using the stateless service ensures that the solution is resilient.

However, loose coupling helps minimize the dependency amongst the various components in the solution.

Option C is INCORRECT because implementing automatic data backup is a failure management best practice and does not contribute to minimize component dependency.

Option D is CORRECT as loose coupling ensures that components are NOT tightly dependent on each other, assuring that if one component fails, it does not impact the working of other components.

Reference:

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS_Well-Architected_Framework.pdf

The correct answer is D. Implement loose coupling.

In a distributed system, it is crucial to ensure that the components of the system operate in a way that one component does not negatively impact the others. This can be achieved by implementing loose coupling between the components.

Loose coupling refers to the design principle where the components of a system are independent and do not rely on each other directly. In this design, the components can communicate with each other through well-defined interfaces or APIs. Loose coupling allows the components to evolve independently and enables the system to be more scalable and fault-tolerant.

Request throttling, which is a mechanism to limit the number of requests or connections to a system, can help to prevent overload on the system but it may not necessarily prevent negative impact on other components of the system.

Using stateless services is another important architectural best practice for distributed systems. Stateless services do not maintain any state information between requests, which makes them easier to scale and more resilient. However, this practice alone may not prevent negative impact on other components of the system.

Enabling automatic data backup is a best practice for data protection but it does not directly address the issue of components impacting each other in a distributed system.

Therefore, the best answer to the question is D. Implement loose coupling. This design principle ensures that the components of a distributed system are independent and communicate with each other through well-defined interfaces or APIs, which can help to prevent negative impact on other components of the system.