Review: Understanding the 8 Fallacies of Distributed Systems

Understanding the 8 Fallacies of Distributed Systems

Overview

The author, Victor Chircu, presents the 8 Fallacies of Distributed Systems in the following format:

• describing the fallacy
• why an engineer must be cognizant of said fallacy
• solution to accommodating said fallacy

This makes for a concise and useful article for those engineers that work on distributed systems and a service oriented architecture. There are a ton of good links to principles both relating to distributed system architecture as well as general system design patterns.

Key Takeaways

• accommodating for lack of network reliability is a hard problem, with retries and queuing presenting problems of their own.
• you should treat systems that are outside of your control differently than components that you own.
• each point presented reinforces the assertion that designing distributed systems is hard.