Can anyone explain in simple words what is transparency in Distributed Systems? I can't understand what it actually is in practice. Here is what I have found:
Transparency: The distributed systems should be perceived as a single entity by the users or the application programmers rather than as a collection of autonomous systems, which are cooperating. The users should be unaware of where the services are located and also the transferring from a local machine to a remote one should also be transparent.
Why should systems be perceived as a single entity by the users? What is the reason for that? Also, please give a realistic example in your answer.
1 Answer
The implications of transparency are a major influence on the design of the system software.
Transparency in simple words is defined as the concealment from the user and the application programmer of the separation of components in a distributed system, so that the system is perceived as a whole rather than as a collection of independent components.
Access transparency enables local and remote resources to be accessed using identical operations.
Location transparency enables resources to be accessed without knowledge of their physical or network location (for example, which building or IP address).
Failure transparency enables the concealment of faults, allowing users and application programs to complete their tasks despite the failure of hardware or software components
Concurrency transparency enables several processes to operate concurrently using shared resources without interference between them.
To give a realistic example, imagine when a website gets hacked and in their homepage appears "we have been hacked... wait till we fix the problem" that does not have Failure transparency. You would want to perceive the users that the system is being updated to hide the fact that their system is "weak" and has been hacked.
You would want to act as a whole rather than as a collection of independent components for transparency.
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