Paper Summary: End-to-End Arguments in System Design

In their 1984 paper "End-to-End Arguments in System Design," Saltzer, Reed, and Clark propose a design principle that helps determine where to place functions within modules of a distributed system. The End-to-End Argument suggests that some functions can only be implemented completely and correctly on an application level, not at the platform level due to lack of context. However, this does not prevent partial implementations or duplications of functions as optimizations. The paper emphasizes that identifying endpoints for applying the argument requires careful analysis of application requirements. An example discussed is reliable file transfer, where failure detection and mitigation should occur on both application and platform layers, but only the application layer can ensure completeness and correctness of the transfer.

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