Crossmachine

Crossmachine is a term used in distributed computing to describe operations and interactions that occur across multiple physical or virtual machines. It covers communication between processes, coordination of tasks, and sharing of state or data in a networked environment.

In practice, crossmachine work is implemented through inter-machine communication channels such as remote procedure calls, RESTful APIs, message queues, and streaming protocols. It enables patterns like client-server, peer-to-peer, master-slave, and multi-master configurations, supporting both stateless services and stateful distributed storage. System designers often organize software as services that run on different machines and coordinate via messages or requests.

Key concerns in crossmachine designs include latency, throughput, fault tolerance, and data consistency across machines. Security is also a priority, with authentication, encryption in transit, and access control. Architectural choices influence reliability, including the balance between synchronous requests and eventual consistency, as well as strategies for idempotency, retries, and fault handling during partitions or failures.

Applications of crossmachine concepts span cloud and data center environments, microservices architectures, distributed databases, edge computing, and high-availability systems. Common tools and frameworks used to implement crossmachine interactions include gRPC and REST for inter-process communication, Apache Kafka for messaging, Redis clusters for distributed caching, and databases such as Cassandra or CockroachDB. The term remains generic and descriptive rather than a formal specification, serving to discuss cross-machine design considerations in distributed software.