Tim Bass
12-18-2008 03:59 AM
Paul Vincent posts The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing where he and his colleagues state that “essentially everyone” makes these assumptions when designing a distributed computing application.

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

I have been designing and building (or architecting) distributed network andInternet applications since around 1988, and I cannot recall one design team who ever made any of the eight assumptions quoted above.

Competent network systems engineers simply do not make these assumptions.



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