Distributed Glossary

Browse 17 distributed terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

17 Distributed Terms

AMQP
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol — an open standard for message-oriented middleware that defines message format, routing, queuing, and delivery guarantees....
Consistent Hashing
A hashing technique where adding or removing a node only requires redistributing 1/n of the keys (where n is the number of nodes), compared to traditional...
Correlation ID
A unique identifier generated at the entry point of a request and propagated through all downstream services, appearing in every log line and trace span....
CRDTs
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types — data structures that can be replicated across multiple nodes and independently updated without coordination, with a...
Federated Learning
A machine learning approach where models are trained across multiple devices or servers holding local data, without exchanging the raw data. Each participant...
Inbox Pattern
The consumer-side counterpart of the outbox pattern: incoming messages are first stored in an inbox table (with deduplication by message ID), then processed....
Leader Election
A coordination pattern in distributed systems where nodes agree on a single leader responsible for a specific task (e.g., writes, scheduling). If the leader...
Message Queue
A message queue is a middleware system enabling asynchronous communication between services. Producers send messages to a queue, where they are stored until...
Outbox Pattern
A pattern for reliable event publishing in microservices: instead of directly publishing to a message broker (which can fail independently of the database),...
Remoting
A programming paradigm that allows objects or methods to be invoked across process or machine boundaries as if they were local, abstracting away network...
Replication
The process of copying and maintaining data across multiple database instances or nodes so that every replica holds the same information, improving...
RPC
RPC, or Remote Procedure Call, is a communication protocol that allows a program to execute a function or procedure on a remote server as if it were a local...
Saga Pattern
A pattern for managing distributed transactions across multiple services by breaking them into a sequence of local transactions, each with a compensating...
Shard
A horizontal partition of a database or dataset distributed across multiple servers, where each shard holds a subset of rows determined by a sharding key.
Tail Latency
The response time experienced by the slowest requests — typically measured at p99 (99th percentile) or p99.9. In distributed systems, tail latency compounds:...
Tombstone
A marker indicating that a record has been deleted, used instead of physically removing data. Common in distributed databases (Cassandra, DynamoDB) and...
Trace
A record of a request's journey through a distributed system, composed of spans (timed operations) connected by parent-child relationships. Each span captures...

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