21 years and counting of 'eight fallacies of distributed computing' (2025)

Article excerpt

A quarter-century after their formulation, the eight fallacies of distributed computing remain remarkably prescient guides for systems architects. Originally articulated by Sun Microsystems engineers in the late 1990s, that the network is reliable, latency is zero, bandwidth is infinite, the network is secure, topology never changes, there is one administrator, transport cost is zero, and the network is homogeneous, these assumptions continue to trip up engineers building cloud systems, microservices, and decentralized applications. The APNIC blog examines how these timeless principles still shape how we design resilient systems, even as deployment patterns and technologies have evolved dramatically.