Hacker News Reader

> Distributed systems are different because they fail often

The key here is not just the rate of failure, but the rate of failure in a system of multiple nodes.

And - "distributed systems problems" don't only arise with several servers connected by a network. Any set of nodes with relations between them - files on disk linked logically, buffers on different IO devices - these are also going to face similar problems.

View on HN

Absolutely. In fact, it's a class of problems that can - and do - arise on any software system comprising more than a sole single-threaded process that's been locked in memory.

Some old-timers love to scoff at the inordinate amount of complexity that comes from mitigating these issues, and will complain that it would all be so much simpler if you would just run your software on a single server.

In reality, that was barely true even back in the AS/400 or VAXft days - and even then it didn't apply to the rather more chaotic multi-user, multi-process Unix world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com