Distributed solution why and where

Distributed approach for solving problem is an emerging and hot topic now a days. It is really a powerful solution. But we should all know first what is the strength and weakness of this approach before we consider of choosing this.

Disadvantage

Well in short the disadvantage of this approach is that it is fairly complex and thus costly for development and maintenance. Skilled people are needed for this kind of solution development.

Then where should we use it

In general there are 2 kind of situation where distributed approach is proffered.

1. Some solutions are only possible by using distributed solution
2. Some solutions are inherently has characteristic of distributed solution

If you want to provide system which survives hardware failure, you need to provide replica which is only possible via distributed solution by having more than one node to support hardware failure. Now if resources are distributed then you have no option but to use distributed solution. Another reason to use distributed approach is to improve performance(by distributing independent tasks to more than one nodes).

Let us think about skype. Skype does not use traditional client server model rather it uses peer to peer model. This is why it can provide scalability without using costly centralized client server structure.