The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing

L. Peter Deutsch first published the “8 Fallacies of Networking” internally while working at Sun Labs in 1991-92. This is a great list of the kind of wishful thinking that clouds so much system design.

Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

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