I agree that this is mostly management's fault, but if engineers knew about the unique challenges distributed systems pose, they wouldn't have released it this way. We have the head architect saying in court that the system is robust. He wouldn't have said so had he known about these issues. It's true that distributed consistency received a lot more attention recently and also that we have better tooling. Sadly, that doesn't translate to better software. I work as a distributed systems consultant and the practices I see would make grown men cry. People don't know more about these questions than those engineers did in 99-00 and so the systems they build are similar to Horizon. My point is that Horizon should be a cautionary tale that stops us from building more badly thought through microservices and integration solutions.

If you'd like to see what the future will look like, look at my recent articles. We're bringing a generic solution to market, which fixes all these problems via SQL and ACID guarantees