> To me something is only a distributed system if it infact has stateful (even ephemerally) components that interact with each other through some sort of distri

> To me something is only a distributed system if it infact has stateful (even ephemerally) components that interact with each other through some sort of distributed consensus or eventual consistency algorithm. Well you're going to learn something new! Here's the short definition from Wikipedia: Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing Any system that is distributed between multiple machines over a network and communicate with each other is a distributed system. The term is purposefully generic and not required to be constrained.