Fault Tolerence
Table of Contents
Also see Chaos Engineering
- ability of a system to continue operating correctly even when some of its components fail.
Fault tolerance is essential for critical systems where downtime or data loss can have severe consequences, such as financial systems, healthcare applications, and online services. It helps ensure that these systems remain operational and accessible even in the face of unexpected failures.
1. Purpose
- To prevent failures from causing complete system downtime or data loss.
2. Types of Failures
4. Strategies
- Redundancy: Having multiple copies of critical components (e.g., servers, disks).
- Replication: Copying data to multiple locations for backup.
- Failover: Automatically switching to a backup component when a primary one fails.
- Error Detection and Correction: Identifying and fixing errors in data or software.
- Load Balancing: Distributing workload to prevent overload and improve performance.
5. Benefits
- Increased Reliability: Reduces the risk of system failures and downtime.
- High Availability: Ensures critical applications and services remain accessible even with failures.
- Data Protection: Safeguards against data loss due to hardware or software malfunctions.
- Improved Performance: Can enhance performance by distributing workload and preventing bottlenecks.
6. Instances
6.1. RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)
Protects against disk failures by storing data redundantly across multiple disks.
6.2. Clustering
Groups servers to provide high availability and failover capabilities.
6.3. Distributed Databases
Replicate data across multiple nodes to ensure data consistency and availability.