You'll have to forgive me for tangenting this a bit, but yours and my sister posters mulling prompted some mulling of my own. While I can certainly say I've ga

You'll have to forgive me for tangenting this a bit, but yours and my sister posters mulling prompted some mulling of my own. While I can certainly say I've gained the apprehensiveness you speak of, I realize I've gained it for systems at scale; centralized or otherwise. In fact, for badly engineered distributed systems, where you previously had one problem (getting modules to communicate) you now have N; (getting modules to communicate over potentially unreliable channels; which may themselves have additional hidden points of failure and varying failure modes/symptoms, etc etc). I'm being a bit high-level-hand-wavy with this, but it seems to get the point across (I hope.) My takeaway being, I'm curious if there have been people who have addressed this potential conundrum (and if you even see what I stated as a problem at all.). Data to show that systems are more/less reliable due to certain failure modes under different architectures would be nice, but that seems like a MASSIVE undertaking to do if you have any desire for the data to be meaningful; if only that it may be testing the competency of the team rather than the actual underlying relative difficulty. (although if done broadly enough maybe that would still provide useful guidance? I'm rambling at this point, but some thoughts.)