The Illusion of One
"Many machines. One mind."
The system looks like one thing. It is many. The interface hides complexity behind abstraction.
The Network Is the Battlefield
"The network drops, delays, and lies."
You cannot assume a message was delivered. You cannot assume it arrived in order. The network is the adversary.
Time Is a Lie
"There is no global clock."
Without a global clock, you cannot know what happened first. Order must be reconstructed from causality, not timestamps.
The Consensus Council
"How do strangers agree?"
Agreement requires a majority. Without it, the system stalls. With it, even leaderless systems can reach consensus.
Replication & Identity
"Copies exist. But which one is truth?"
You can have consistency or availability during a partition. Not both. Every database makes this tradeoff.
Failure Is Normal
"Everything fails. Constantly."
Systems aren't reliable because nothing fails. They're reliable because they're designed for failure.
Scale
"Growth changes physics."
At small scale, simple architectures work. At large scale, the wrong architecture fails catastrophically.