I agree with what James Mickens has to say about this area of expertise. Usually the thinking is to expect that things mostly work (which is wrong) and that in case of an inconsistency sending another message could fix it (which more often than not is also wrong). In an unreliable environment a new message might not arrive and even if it does it might not contain any meaningful information for the receiver as he can'…
Its funny how these tenets map out to relationships to humans. Replace messenger with "friend" and it still retains a measure of truth.
Re: The Byzantine Generals Problem (1982) [pdf]
#21This is not a coincidence. I'm a worker node in a distributed international corp, and we have a lot of communication errors and timeouts, protocol errors and interpreter bugs, as well as byzantine generals called managers. Our kafka is called email and instead of kubernetes we sometimes use cubicles.