Distribute And Win

From space projects to mundane computing tasks, distributed systems are very often better than a single monolithic design.

- Rajeev Srinivasan

THERE ARE MANY instances, both in nature and business, of the virtues of distributed systems as compared to monolithic systems. One of the most obvious is the rise of open-source software, as argued persuasively by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (available online). He argues that “cathedrals” (hierarchical, well-organised companies which are the western norm, eg. IBM, Microsoft) will in the long run be defeated by “bazaars” (loosely federated groups of workers).

In the context of operating systems (the software that controls devices), and specifically of the UNIX and Linux systems (which is what Eric was focusing on), this prophecy has largely come true. Microsoft, so dominant in the last century, has now lost its monopoly.

If you consider smartphones and tablets as well, the newcomer operating system Android (from Google) now accounts for as much as 60 per cent of the world’s devices, with Apple’s iOS running another 10 per cent. And both are derived from UNIX and Linux; Microsoft Windows’ share, once 90 per cent, is around 30 per cent.

A major difference is that UNIX/ Linux are, fundamentally, distributed systems. The original design of UNIX was radically different from that of operating systems that existed before it, such as the monolithic IBM System/360. UNIX (and its rewrite Linux) depends on many small pieces of code, each of which does one thing well, and which are loosely connected (technically through “pipes”).