A truly fault-tolerant system is one that expects failures and gracefully recovers while maintaining a seamless user experience.
Key steps to achieve fault tolerance include eliminating single points of failure, using circuit breakers to prevent cascading failures, enabling self-healing mechanisms, ensuring idempotency to avoid duplicate side effects, and implementing graceful degradation strategies.
Monitoring relevant metrics and alerting actionable events, testing for resilience under stress conditions, preparing for regional outages, and fostering a culture that anticipates failures are vital components of building a fault-tolerant system.
By following guidelines such as removing SPOFs, utilizing circuit breakers, supporting self-healing processes, maintaining idempotency, handling graceful degradation, and promoting a resilient culture, a truly fault-tolerant system can be developed.