What is a distributed system?

Question

Programming

How many times I meet the concept of a distributed system, I just can’t understand what it means. Google interprets difficult and not clear, there are no specific examples. Explain, please, in an accessible language, what's what.

Answer 1

A distributed system is a software system in which components located on networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages. The components interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal.

It seems to me a more than understandable definition.
In simple terms, imagine that you have divided your application into pieces and scattered these pieces over different physical machines. In order to do something, each piece communicates with others by sending them messages and receiving responses. If some part of the system has a greater load than the rest, you can duplicate this piece on several servers, etc. Also, in the case of large amounts of data, it is convenient to store data in parts on different servers.
This is one of the main approaches when building really large projects. You can also read about microservices and other similar approaches.

Answer 2

a system distributed over several servers, which is not clear here.