"Shibboleths" are phrases you use to tell if a person is of a geniune member of a society or a pretender. The article discuss some of the positive and negative Shibboleths a vendor may use for distributed systems:

Positive:

• We made the operation idempotent
• The system makes incremental progress
• Every component is crash-only
• We shard it on <some reasonably high cardinality value>

Negative:

• Our system is Consistent and Available.
• at-least-once and at-most-once are nice, but our system implements exactly-once
• I just need Transactions to solve my distributed systems problems
• I will take a distributed lock

("Shibboleths" may be best translated into "暗號" I suppose?)