Fallacies Of Distributed Computing by Marcos Benevides

:ID: 5a3ae2dc-5a54-4ba1-a638-f6090502d8ae

Between 1991 and 1997, engineers at Sun Microsystems collected a list of mistakes that programmers commonly make when writing software for networked computers. Bill Joy, Dave Lyon, L Peter Deutsch, and James Gosling cataloged eight assumptions that developers commonly hold about Distributed Systems. These assumptions, while obviously incorrect when stated explicitly, nevertheless inform many of the decisions that the Sun engineers found in systems of the day. (Perry 2020, 6)

  1. The network is reliable
  2. Latency is zero
  3. Bandwidth is infinite
  4. The network is secure
  5. Topology doesn’t change
  6. There is one administrator
  7. Transport cost is zero
  8. The network is homogenous

References

Perry, Michael L. 2020. The Art of Immutable Architecture. Springer.