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Discussion on: Transparency: Illusions of a Single System (Part 1)

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Aniket02

Thanks for the great write-up!In what sense are they transparencies? I am just having trouble wrapping my head around the term transparency, when they all refer to 'hiding' certain aspects of a distributed system.

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rhymes • Edited

I think it depends on which POV you're looking at the system.

If you change anything inside the distributed system, such change is transparent to the user because they can keep on accessing a resource like nothing ever happened.

Think about a networked file system: you access a file without knowing or caring where the file actually and phisically is, so the system is transparent.

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Jamie Gaskins

I agree, it's a confusing term because transparency commonly refers to being able to see the inner workings, but in this case it means "operating in such a way as to not be perceived by users" (definition 7). So if you think about it as if it's so transparent that it's invisible, it makes a bit more sense.