In distributed systems, network reliability is often taken for granted until something goes wrong. While we frequently discuss the theoretical unreliability of networks, our experience shows that the overwhelming majority of network issues stem from misconfigurations – rather than actual infrastructure failures. It is also often hard to prove that a network outage stemmed from a cloud provider if you don’t have real-time observability into the network.

Vishal Jaishankar

December 13, 2024