In this post, we’ll look at some of the ways distributed systems can trip you up and some of the ways that folks are handling those obstacles.
Forget Conway’s Law, distributed systems at scale follow Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
At scale, statistics are not your friend. The more instances of anything you have, the higher the likelihood one or more of them will break. Probably at the same time.
Services will fall over before they’ve received your message, while they’re processing your message or after they’ve processed it but before they’ve told you they have. The network will lose packets, disks will fail, virtual machines will unexpectedly terminate.
There are things a monolithic architecture guarantees that are no longer true when we’ve distributed our system.
Read more at The New Stack
