Scatter Gather
In plain terms
Sending a request to many services then combining their replies.
Going deeper
Scatter-gather broadcasts a query to multiple nodes in parallel and aggregates their responses into one result. It parallelizes then merges.
Under the hood
Speeds up distributed queries but is limited by the slowest responder; needs timeouts and partial-result handling.
Examples
Distributed search, parallel queries, sharded databases, aggregation.
Think of it like...
Like asking several librarians to each search a section, then merging what they find.