Fallacies of Distributed Systems

Jun 5, 2022

The eight fallacies of distributed systems come from different engineers at Sun Microsystems.

The first four are from Bill Joy and Tom Lyon (co-founders of Sun). Five, six, and 7 come from L. Peter Deutsch (designer of PostScript). The last is attributed to James Gosling (lead designer of Java).

  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

Some other lists: