Commodity distributed systems

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The creation of a distributed system is a major engineering exercise, often costing many millions of dollars to design, and several times more to operate. Indeed, the total cost in North America just to keep existing computing systems functioning exceeds $40 billion annually. In spite of this expense, computer systems are typically insecure and unreliable. The single major cause of this problem is that the complexity of these systems exceeds the abilities of all but the very best of human experts. Even the installation of a networked home computer often requires significant systems knowledge. The evidence suggests that this complexity is inherent. Over time this problem will get worse not better, as we build larger systems and inter-connect those systems.