Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition

Abstract

The definition of distributed computing can be confusing. Sometimes, it refers to a tightly coupled cluster of computers working together to look like one larger computer. More often, however, it refers to a bunch of loosely related applications chattering together without a lot of system-level support. This lack of support in distributed computing environments makes it difficult to write applications that work together. Messages sent between systems do not have crisp guarantees for delivery. They can get lost, and so, after a timeout, they are retried. The application on the other side of the communication may see multiple messages arrive where one was intended. These messages may be reordered and interleaved with different messages. Ensuring that the application behaves as intended can be very hard to design and implement. It is even harder to test.