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Resilience

As explained in Effective Platform Engineering

Resilience is the ability of a system to continue providing acceptable service or recover when experiencing faults, disruption, or degraded conditions.

Resilience is a system’s ability to self-correct after failure while continuing acceptable service or recovering without prolonged disruption. Unlike availability, which emphasizes redundancy and traffic redirection, resilience emphasizes recovery from failure events. section 1.3.3

A resilient platform turns failure handling into an architectural and operational capability:

  • Protects against data loss and prolonged outages caused by events such as power or data-center failures. section 1.3.3
  • Uses self-healing to restore desired state when services fail, move workloads from failing infrastructure, or adjust capacity to traffic. section 7.0
  • Measures customer experience through published service-level indicators and objectives rather than treating uptime alone as sufficient. section 5.4

Response time versus outage duration

A service responding in 40 milliseconds for 99.99% of the month but suffering two outages totaling 52 minutes may provide a worse human experience than one responding in 40 milliseconds for 99.9% of the month while serving the remaining requests more slowly. Published SLOs make the chosen experience measurable and actionable. section 5.4

Figure 5.11 SLIs inform SLOs that can be used to notify and publish SLAs.
A diagram of customer trust

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Use the SLI-to-SLO-to-SLA relationship to connect operational measurements, internal targets, notifications, and customer commitments. section 5.4

How Effective Platform Engineering covers it

How deep it goes
Distinguishes resilience from availability, then connects it to self-healing orchestration and measurable service objectives.
Examples
Uses data-center failures, Kubernetes recovery actions, and contrasting response-time and outage profiles as concrete examples.
What you can do after
Operate/configure it by defining service objectives, tracking them observably, and applying orchestration that restores undesired states.
How it connects
Connects resilience with availability, self-healing, Kubernetes, observability, service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and service-level agreements.

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This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Effective Platform Engineering. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.