Abstract:

Modern distributed systems engineering grapples with fundamental trade-offs between consistency, scalability, and reliability. This paper formalizes three conceptual frames—the Instantiated (Concrete) Frame, the Fractal Frame, and the Entropic Frame—as powerful operational models for understanding and designing these systems.

We demonstrate that these blocks are not merely descriptive but executable, offering complementary implementations that materialize the core tensions in decentralized computation.

By contrasting their operational implementations, runtime principles, and deployed instantiations, we provide a unified schema for reasoning about system behavior from the code to the cluster.