📡 Communication Patterns in Distributed Systems

Welcome back to The Code Hut Distributed Systems series! In this post, we’ll explore how distributed nodes communicate reliably and efficiently. 🌐📡

🌟 Why Communication Patterns Matter

Distributed systems rely on network communication. Choosing the right pattern affects performance, reliability, and scalability.

1. 🔗 REST (Representational State Transfer)

REST is a popular synchronous HTTP-based communication pattern:

• ✅ Simple, widely supported
• 📝 Stateless requests
• 🐞 Easy to debug and monitor

// Spring Boot REST client example
@RestController
public class OrderController {
    @GetMapping("/orders/{id}")
    public Order getOrder(@PathVariable Long id) {
        return orderService.findOrder(id);
    }
}

2. ⚡ gRPC

gRPC is a high-performance RPC framework using Protocol Buffers:

• 🔄 Supports streaming
• 📜 Strongly typed contracts
• ⏱️ Lower latency than REST

// gRPC service definition example
service OrderService {
    rpc GetOrder(OrderRequest) returns (OrderResponse);
}

3. 📨 Asynchronous Messaging (Kafka)

Kafka allows asynchronous, decoupled communication between services:

• 📤 Producers send events to topics
• 📥 Consumers read events independently
• ⚡ Supports high throughput and fault tolerance

// Kafka producer example
producer.send(new ProducerRecord<>("orders", orderId, order));

Next in the Series

In the next post, we’ll explore Resilience Patterns 🛡️, such as circuit breakers, bulkheads, and failover strategies in distributed systems.

Label for this post: Distributed Systems