• Looks like a regular function invocation to the client, but it actually triggers action on a remote machine
  • Ideally, the location is transparent to the caller
  • In practice, various failure modes that only come up with distributed systems come into play
  • Kleppman claims in his concurrent systems course that REST and Ajax are forms of RPC
    • I don’t agree
    • Many others don’t, either
    • But this is a topic of some debate
  • In Designing Data-Intensive Systems