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

A couple more that don't seem to be represented there. No mention of cause and effect, or the order in which different nodes perceive things happening? Anyway here's three which I think might be more relevant to designing and building software:

* Your system is not a distributed system

Multiple users connect, disconnect, and use your system at the same time, some of the code is running on your servers, some of it's in your partners' servers, some of it's in your storage layer, and some of it's running on your users' computers

* Your DB's ACID transactions are sufficient for distributed thinking

An ACID transaction lets you addUser() to your storage, either succeeding completely or failing completely, with no observable intermediate state. It does not let both your frontend and your storage layer addUser(), same with both your storage and your partner's storage.

* Your DB's transactions are ACID

Your DB vendors cannot build databases that are acceptably fast while running ACID. Therefore isolation is relaxed and transactions can commit through each other. Even if the DB itself was ACID, your ORM and/or programming style is likely breaking ACID independently of the DB configuration.

Also, the four fallacies of local computing:

- The CPU is infinitely fast.

- RAM is infinite.

- CPU caches don't exist.

- Cache lines don't exist.

In this instance latency must’ve been 10 years, per my memory this paper came out in 1994

There needs to be a distinction - because people are making an honest conflation - between distributed computing and cloud computing. The list in the article applies to both, but the limits and performance variability can apply quicker - and with more effect - in the cloud.

Do people actually believe these dot points or are they just out of scope for most applications to tackle beyond letting the user try again?

This article reiterates a lot of the Wikipedia stuff, while contradicting the main extant source which is Deutsch himself (https://se-radio.net/2021/07/episode-470-l-peter-deutsch-on-...). Nobody really knows who wrote the first four fallacies. They were just floating around it is Deutsch who pinned them down and it was Gosling’s endorsement that made them into the shibboleth that they are.

On the one hand, the list isn't wrong.

On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to computational needs, than by assuming that every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters.

This is highly relevant to the recent craze over microservices, which has settled down now (after un-neccasarily complicating systems at multiple companies).