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In a distributed system, there is no "primary" system. All systems are distributed and decoupled. The UX sends a request and waits for a response that itself be composed of other requests and responses from multiple other systems. The failures have to be assumed and mitigated for at the UX level, not at some back-end level.

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By "primary system", I meant the initial system(s) interacted with in a distributed environment. Assuming a connection based distributed model (e.g. TCP/IP), there is a system on the other end of the connection to which a client is communicating. Even for connectionless models, in my mind the "primary system" would be defined as the set of systems which could possibly respond to a client's request.

Perhaps the term "primary" is not the best fit for this role. It just seemed less verbose than saying something like "the set of systems for which a client is directly aware and may interact with."

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