In a distributed system there is no central point of control. Rather, a decentralized management paradigm is in place. Each unit, nearly independently, decides to which extent they wish to participate in the distributed system. Individual systems enter and leave the distributed system at will and decide, autonomously, which components are useful.
The distributed system has no one control. Actions of individual systems are governed by policy guidelines where compliance is optional. In general, a guideline change closely reflect the actual behavior change of the distributed system.
There is no one control point for the total distributed system but the distributed system relies on the availability of core underlying infrastructure to make all of this possible. For each core infrastructure service in the distributed system, in contrast, there is a well defined control point. From this control point the core infrastructure services are managed. The collection of these core infrastructure control points enable the existence of the distributed system and empower the remaining systems to exhibit autonomous distributed control.