GoKawiilYou’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 the original eight founders and employees of Sun Microsystems.
Sun integrated high-speed graphics, the UNIX operating system, and a working Internet protocol stack, which led to the explosion in desktop computing, their meteoric rise, and ultimate acquisition by Oracle Computing. When you use a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) variant, a Linux distribution, or even Android, you’re using technology that has followed a lineage from Sun Microsystems. Think of the ZFS file system, the Network File System (NFS) protocol for network file storage, and Java, to name a few.
The list was later expanded by L. Peter Deutsch, who added a further three fallacies while at Sun. The final fallacy was coined by James Gosling, who, fittingly, also worked at Sun, bringing us to the eight fallacies we now know and love.
Over time, these ideas have settled and inspired other lists of fallacies — for example, the fallacies surrounding dates and times, or the falsehoods people believe about names. I would be surprised if there weren’t more. We encounter these date and name errors constantly, whether filling in forms or interacting with assets on the web or in apps.
The underlying eight fallacies of distributed computing are buried ‘constants’ in our use of the network. They are worth thinking about as network operators, whether in protocol and software design, or how they impact users in daily life. By keeping them in mind, we can better address the behaviours that arise from these fallacies as we encounter them online.
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