Since we’re all about solutions here at OSI, we figured it wouldn’t be right to simply throw AWS ‘under the bus’ without providing some thoughts and ideas on how to most effectively prepare yourself from having a total system failure from the inevitable localized outage.
To this end, we would like to share this whitepaper by another partner of ours Stephen Balukoff, CTO of Bluebox. It breaks down the process of Distributed System Design into manageable chunks and provides a thorough and explicit account of the CAP theorem, solid guidelines to follow:
The 8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing:
- 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 homogenous
The corollary to the above fallacies are:
The Truths About Networks in a Distributed Environment:
- The network is unreliable and will fail often
- Latency has a significant effect on your application
- Bandwidth is often limited
- The network is insecure
- Network topology changes frequently, especially the more geographically distant two nodes are
- There are many administrators. Different administrators unfortunately will do things differently. The less you have to rely on specific policies behaviors of any given administrator, the better
- Transport costs can be significant
- The network is not homogenous. Your packets may get split apart, TTLs messed with, and certain kinds of traffic filtered outside of your control. This can vary depending on which paths your packets take
Read the full 35 page White Paper:
BlueBox Distributed Systems Design.pdf
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