Introduction

The previous lesson taught us about the end nodes of a distributed system, which treats the network that connects them as a black box.

This chapter will examine the various components of this network, which facilitates communication between the nodes that form a distributed system.

Applications typically rely on a set of well-specified protocols which allow these applications to perform their functions at a high-level of proficiency, without the need to deal with low-level details. This means that people can build applications in many cases without the knowledge of how these lower levels functions work.

However, this knowledge does enable us to ...