SRE Prodverbs

"Prodverbs" (or production proverbs) is a cool collection of sayings maintained by Google's SRE team, which all of us who write or maintain distributed systems should understand. Let's explore each one:

It captures an important challenge in distributed systems: the need for agreement among multiple components. In a distributed system, processes often need to reach consensus on a single value or state to maintain consistency and coordinate their actions. However, relying on perfect agreement is unrealistic in the face of network partitions, split-brain situations, hardware failures, etc. The prodverb serves as a reminder that building reliable distributed systems requires careful design and the use of proven consensus algorithms, such as Paxos and Raft, which ensure that all processes in the group will eventually converge on a single agreed-upon value, even in the presence of failures and unreliable networks.