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throwaway894345last Saturday at 7:36 PM1 replyview on HN

Yes, but you have to go out of your way when writing software to make it so the software can only run on one node at a time. Or rather, well-architected software should require minimal, isolated edits to run in a distributed configuration (for example, replacing SQLite with a distributed SQLite).


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thaynelast Saturday at 11:55 PM

That's just not true. Distributed software is much more complicated and difficult than non-distributed software. Distributed systems have many failure modes that you don't have to worry about in non-distributed systems.

Now maybe you could have an abstraction layer over your storage layer that supports multiple data stores, including a distributed one. But that comes with tradeoffs, like being limited to the least common denominator of features of the data stores, and having to implement the abstraction layer for multiple data stores.