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Distributed system expectation

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#1

The lesson mentioned that “you may see that your feed is not loading on the Instagram app, but that you can still upload a new photo. This exposes that part of the Instagram system is running on one set of nodes, and another part is probably running independently on a different set of nodes. This is what we call a state of incoherence.”

Does that mean the expectation of the distributed system is that everything must be working in one piece (coherence)? Take instagram as an example, if feed function does not work, upload function should not work as well, otherwise, it will be incoherent.

#2

Hi Manxiang_Zhang,

Yes, that’s a correct interpretation. In a distributed system, coherence refers to the expectation that all parts of the system should work together seamlessly, maintaining a consistent and unified state. When there is incoherence, as described in the example with Instagram, it means that different parts of the system might not be synchronized or working together as expected.

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