Introducing distributed computing

Most cloud-native architectures involve splitting an application into several discrete services that communicate over a network link rather than an in-process method invocation. This makes cloud-native applications implicitly distributed applications, and while distributed computing is nothing new, it does increase the need to understand the benefits and pitfalls of distributed computing. When building distributed applications, it is important to consider and understand the eight fallacies of distributed computing. These are as follows:

• 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.

In essence, what these fallacies mean is that a network call is slower, less secure, less reliable, and harder to fix than invoking a Java method call or a C procedure. When creating cloud-native applications, care needs to be taken to ensure these fallacies are correctly accounted for, otherwise, the application will be slow, unreliable, insecure, and impossible to debug.

An application consisting of multiple services interacting across the network can produce many benefits, such as the ability to individually scale and update services, but care must be taken to design services to minimize the number of network interactions required to deliver the ultimate business solution.

As a result, several cloud-native architectures can be used to build cloud-native applications that present different tradeoffs between the benefits and challenges of distributed computing.