DNS Exemplifies Distributed Systems Tradeoffs

The internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack, yet it doesn’t survive a DNS misconfiguration. How did we get here? And what can we learn from DNS that applies to our distributed architecture (eg microservices)?

It is easy to blame the failures on centralization, but we need to look deeper because any distributed architecture is subject to forces that push it in conflicting directions. Let’s explore this in detail.