There Is No Getting Around It: You Are Building a Distributed System.

The article discusses building a distributed system. Discussion centers on a sample Web service that resizes an image. Topics covered include constructing the architecture for a distributed system, breaking a distributed system down into its constituent services, details for the associated application programming interface (API), using a distributed message queue to deliver images to transcoding servers, automating failovers to satisfy available service-level agreements, and the testing and validation of a distributed system.