Tech News - What are Centralized, Decentralized & Distributed Networks.
Centralized Systems
Centralized systems are the most commonly used type of system, which uses client/server architecture where one or more client nodes (A) are directly connected to a central server (B). YouTube is one such example. When you enter 'blockchain' in the YouTube search bar, this search term is sent as a request to the YouTube servers which then respond back with a list of relevant videos. In this scenario, our devices act as clients, and YouTube servers are the central servers. Failure of the central server causes the entire network to fail because there is no other entity to respond.
Decentralized System
In a decentralized system, there is no centralized authority and everyone can take part in the network. Decentralized systems use multiple central nodes (C), each of which usually stores a copy of the resources users can access. By design, this system is more tolerant to faults as compared to a centralized one. That's because one central node failure causes a part of the system to fail; not the whole system. The others can continue to provide data access to users. Bitcoin is the most popular use case of a decentralized system. No single entity/organization owns the Bitcoin network. The network is a sum of all the nodes that talk to each other for maintaining the amount of Bitcoin every account holder has.
Distributed System
A Distributed system is similar to a decentralized one in that it doesn’t have a single central owner. In a distributed network, all network services and coordination tasks are split evenly among many equal servers across the entire network. All data processing, computational resources, and network management functions are shared by nodes distributed geographically and logically across the whole network. Google search system can be presented as an example, where each request is worked upon by hundreds of computers that crawl the web and return the relevant results. To the user, Google appears to be one system, but it actually is multiple computers working together to accomplish one single task (return the results to the search query).
Looking at the above diagram and functionality, we can clearly state that decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems, are more independent, and have no central controlling authority.
