February 2026
Intermediate to advanced
672 pages
21h 56m
English
Content preview from Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 9. The Trouble with Distributed Systems
They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them.
A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (1928)
As discussed in “Reliability and Fault Tolerance”, making a system reliable means ensuring that the system as a whole continues working, even when things go wrong (i.e., when there is a fault). However, anticipating all the possible faults and handling them is not that easy. As a developer, it is very tempting to focus mostly on the happy path (after all, most of the time things work fine!) and to neglect faults, since they introduce a lot of edge cases.
If you want your system to be reliable in the presence of faults, you have to radically change your mindset and focus on what could go wrong, even though it may be unlikely. It doesn’t matter whether there is only a one-in-a-million chance; in a large enough system, one-in-a-million events happen every day. Experienced systems operators will tell you that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Working with distributed systems is also fundamentally different from writing software on a single computer—the main difference being that things can go wrong in lots of new and exciting ways 1, 2]. In this chapter, you will get a taste of the problems that arise in practice and an understanding of what you can and cannot rely on.
To understand the challenges we are up against, we will turn our pessimism up to the maximum and explore the many types of things that may ...
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