I've read through ItCP. The illustrations were wonderful, but I was rather annoyed by the typeface.

... And somewhat disappointed by the conclusions. A Java compiler (sans an overview of limitations/capabilities, but I understand the limitations of the format), and a... Haskell library, which, unfortunately, is incredibly irrelevant to me.

How is this subject approached in practice? I'm fairly familiar with authentication (generally handed off to a bespoke service + library that abstracts away most of this for the end programmer), but my generalist experience with other coordination problems between distributed systems is that programmers tend to not be particularly rigorous about them - and try their best to break down cross-service relationships to very, very simple-to-implement-in-a-bespoke-fashion cases.