Fallacies of Distributed Systems

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:

• Falsehoods programmers believe about names

• Falsehoods programmers believe about networks

• Falsehoods programmers believe about time

• Falsehoods programmers believe about CSVs

• Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

• Falsehoods programmers believe about search

• Falsehoods programmers believe about web development