Have you ever encountered a use case where you need to connect with multiple sources and aggregate their responses into a single response? If yes, then you already have some understanding of scatter-gather. Scatter-gather is an enterprise integration pattern, a design pattern to scale distributed systems or services running on the cloud, or a way to get a solution to the problem — “How to write code to fetch data from N sources?”.
The scatter-gather pattern provides guidelines to spread the load in distributed systems or achieve parallelism and reduce the response time of applications handling requests from multiple users. In this article, we’ll investigate this pattern in-depth. I’ll solve one simple problem by applying scatter-gather and later discuss the applicability of this pattern for complex use cases.