Eight fallacies of distributed computing, 21 years on

APNIC’s retrospective revisits Peter Deutsch’s classic list — the network is reliable, latency is zero, bandwidth is infinite, the network is secure, topology doesn’t change, there’s one administrator, transport cost is zero, the network is homogeneous — and the uncomfortable part is how little has actually changed. Two decades on, these still show up as buried assumptions in how people design systems, not as relics from before cloud, mobile, and edge. Worth a periodic re-read any time a design doc quietly assumes the network will just behave.