Still today, synchronous communication is a common pattern of communication used in software design to handle the communication between different components in distributed systems. Synchronous communication means that all the parts involved in the communication, be they processes, services, or entire systems, need to be always ready and available at the same time to send and receive messages with each other. When one component sends a message, it must wait and stop whatever it was doing until it gets a reply back. As a real-life example, consider a live conversation where you expect an immediate answer to your question and you cannot continue talking or doing other things till the other person has replied.