Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

by Martin Kleppmann

This chapter is a thoroughly pessimistic and depressing overview of things that may go wrong in a distributed system.

Correction, this whole book is a pessimistic and depressing overview of things that may go wrong. If you want to go full cynic, read the results of the Jepsen tests.