> Building a distributed system isn't hard per-se. I think this may be a bit overstated. It's certainly true that most of the algorithms, etc. are -- if not n

> Building a distributed system isn't hard per-se. I think this may be a bit overstated. It's certainly true that most of the algorithms, etc. are -- if not necessarily simple -- at least understandable/understood generally. IME the problem is really all of the engineering around the algorithmic stuff. One thing which I don't think is really well understood yet is different levels of Consistency. There are a lot of trade-offs to be made here, but generally I find that it's really hard to help people understand what those trade-offs are and how they could impact the UX and business. (After that there's things like how to handle configuration changes safely, how to properly dispose of nodes, etc. etc.)