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

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay. You’d think that by now, networks were well enough understood that people would stop making assumptions that we have known, almost since the dawn of networking, to be untrue. Yet as users, developers, and network administrators, we still seem curiously unable to let go of long-held beliefs. Perhaps the best-known collection of mistaken ideas about networks is the eight fallacies of distributed computing. The eight fallacies The network is reliable Latency is zero Bandwidth is infinite The network is secure Topology doesn’t change There is one administrator Transport cost is zero The network is homogeneous Where did this list come from? The list began with four original fallacies (the first four in the list), collected by Bill Joy and Tom Lyon, two of…

Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at APNIC Blog.