
Distributed system definition at DEC SRC bulletin board (1987) - sunainapai
https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.txt
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cbm-vic-20
Right around this time, the VMS side of the house was releasing VAXcluster,
which was really quite robust, and ahead of its time. Lots of ideas that are
now in systems like Kubernetes have very close parallels to VAXcluster
systems: nodes that dynamically join the cluster, load failover to other
nodes, shared resources like disk and security policies, asymmetric nodes etc.

[https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/vaxclusters.pdf](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/vaxclusters.pdf)

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Upvoter33
Not sure why this is being posted now. In the context of early collections of
computers on a LAN, sometimes with a shared (flaky) file server, this comment
makes sense, and was (kind of) funny.

However, it seems out-of-touch today, because of years of work in building
_more_ reliable systems out of distributed components has made the internet
and scalable internet services possible.

It is perhaps not without irony that one of the key idea drivers in this space
was Lamport himself, with early papers on clocks and synchronization, and
later work on Paxos, which is found at the heart of many of the most reliable
systems in the world.

Perhaps we should call this a "Lamport's Irony"; when you complain about
something (jokingly) and then spend your career fixing the problem you
complained about.

~~~
jrott
I think this is worth looking at to see the history of why building
distributed systems is hard.

Also this, "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you
didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." Is a good
kind of funny explanation of what can go wrong.

Lamport obviously did spend his career fixing the problem and we owe a
tremendous amount to him.

