Architecture

Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Eight false assumptions that programmers new to distributed systems commonly make.

architecture scaling complexity

Peter Deutsch and James Gosling identified eight fallacies:

  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 homogeneous

Every distributed systems bug can be traced back to violating one of these assumptions. Modern cloud architectures must account for all eight.

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