Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

• 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

For more details, read the article by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz

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