the fallacies of distributed computing

networkingcloudprogramming

The eight assumptions every distributed-systems novice makes, starting with 'the network is reliable', catalogued at Sun in the 1990s.

Peter Deutsch and colleagues at Sun, with James Gosling adding the last, listed what newcomers wrongly assume: the network is reliable, latency is zero, bandwidth is infinite, the network is secure, topology does not change, there is one administrator, transport cost is zero, and the network is homogeneous. Every timeout bug, thundering herd, and split-brain is one of the eight collecting its debt. The list is this site's home turf condensed to a paragraph: networks fail, and honest systems are designed by people who believe it.

Also known as: the eight fallacies

← All glossary entries