Transparency

Transparency “is the concealment from the user of the separation of components of a distributed system so that the system is perceived as a whole”. Transparency in distributed systems is applied at several aspects such as :

Access Transparency – Local and Remote access to the resources should be done with same efforts and operations. It enables local and remote objects to be accessed using identical operations.

Location transparency – User should not be aware of the location of resources. Wherever is the location of resource it should be made available to him as and when required.

Migration transparency – It is the ability to move resources without changing their names.

Replication Transparency – In distributed systems to achieve fault tolerance, replicas of resources are maintained. The Replication transparency ensures that users cannot tell how many copies exist.

Concurrency Transparency – As in distributed system multiple users work concurrently, the resource sharing should happen automatically without the awareness of concurrent execution by multiple users.

Failure Transparency – Users should be concealed from partial failures. The system should cope up with partial failures without the users awareness.

Parallelism transparency - Activities can happen in parallel without users knowing