Latest Fault Tolerance Articles

Availability patterns are system design techniques that keep applications operational during failures, overload, dependency issues, or partial outages.

Reliable systems are designed to continue serving requests when individual components fail. Servers crash, databases become unavailable, downstream APIs slow down, traffic spikes unexpectedly, and network connections break. The architecture determines whether those failures remain isolated or turn i

The Bulkhead Pattern is a reliability pattern that isolates resources so a failure or overload in one part of a system cannot consume all available capacity and bring down unrelated functionality.

A circuit breaker is a reliability pattern that temporarily stops calls to a failing dependency instead of repeatedly sending requests that are likely to fail.

Kafka fault tolerance is built around partition replication. Instead of storing a partition on only one broker, Kafka keeps multiple replicas across brokers so another replica can take over when the current leader becomes unavailable.

High availability is not achieved by running more servers. A system becomes highly available when individual component failures do not become application-wide outages and recovery happens automatically within an acceptable time.

A load balancer can protect an application from individual backend failures, but only if the load-balancing layer itself is highly available . Replacing one application server with one load balancer simply moves the single point of failure.