Resilience

As explained in The Art of Code

Resilience is the ability of a software system to continue providing acceptable behavior during disruptions and recover from failures.

Resilience is a system’s ability to recover gracefully from unexpected failures or pressure while continuing to provide acceptable behavior. It treats transient failures, dependency outages, traffic spikes, misuse, and attacks as conditions software must withstand rather than exceptions to normal operation. section 9.0 section 9.2

Design resilience along two complementary dimensions:

• Recover from failures with retries, circuit breakers, and fallbacks when dependencies become unresponsive. section 9.2
• Remain stable under load by regulating demand and containing pressure with rate limiters, backpressure, bulkheads, and time limiters. section 9.2
• Preserve useful behavior during partial outages with caches, watchdogs, and graceful degradation that prioritizes essential features. section 9.2

Contain a slow dependency

A slow payment service should not block product-catalog requests. A bulkhead isolates their connection pools, thread pools, or clients so payment pressure remains contained while the catalog continues functioning. A time limiter can release resources from payment operations that run too long. section 9.2

Figure 9.1 Layers of durability

Use the durability layers to place resilience within a broader design: implementation supports change, operability supports reliable behavior, testing protects evolution, and external contracts provide stability. section 9.0

How The Art of Code covers it

How deep it goes

Defines two resilience dimensions and names recovery, overload-control, containment, and degradation patterns without detailing their implementations.

Examples

Uses traffic spikes, dependency outages, a slow payment service, product-catalog isolation, caches, watchdogs, and reduced noncritical features.

What you can do after

Apply it via retries, circuit breakers, fallbacks, rate limiters, bulkheads, time limiters, caches, watchdogs, and graceful degradation.

How it connects

Connects resilience with retries, circuit breakers, fallbacks, rate limiting, backpressure, bulkheads, time limits, caching, watchdogs, and graceful degradation.

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Also explained in

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  Elixir in Action, Third EditionFault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue providing acceptable service when components fail or errors occur.
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  Amazon Web Services in Action, Third Edition: An in-depth guide to AWSA fault-tolerant service continues providing its intended functionality despite failures in components or infrastructure.
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  Quarkus in ActionFault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue providing acceptable service despite failures in its components or dependencies.
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  Effective Platform EngineeringResilience is the ability of a system to continue providing acceptable service or recover when experiencing faults, disruption, or degraded conditions.
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  Platform Engineering on KubernetesResilience is the ability of an application or service to continue providing useful functionality despite failures in its components or dependencies.
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  Architecting an Apache Iceberg LakehouseFault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue operating correctly or recover without unacceptable data loss or corruption after component failures.
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  Data-Driven CybersecurityAn organization’s ability to prepare for, withstand, adapt to, and recover from disruptive events such as cyberattacks.
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  Kafka for ArchitectsFault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue providing its required behavior despite failures in components or dependencies.
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  LatencyFault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue providing acceptable service despite failures of components or dependencies.
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  Lead Developer Career GuideThe ability to remain effective and recover while facing difficulty, pressure, or setbacks.
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  Think Distributed SystemsThe ability of a system or protocol to continue providing acceptable behavior despite component or network failures.
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  Go in Practice, Second EditionFault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue operating or recover when components or operations fail.

Compare how 13 books explain resilience →

Related concepts

• uptimecontrasts with · Uptime is the duration or proportion of a specified period during which a system or service is operational and available to provide its intended function.
• replicationaddressed by · Replication is the creation or maintenance of multiple copies of data, state, or functionality across separate locations or components.
• retryuses · A retry is a subsequent attempt to perform an operation after an earlier attempt fails or does not complete successfully.
• redundancycontrasts with · Redundancy is the presence of duplicate or overlapping information, components, or resources, whether intentional or unnecessary.
• Tree-of-thoughtproduced by · Tree-of-thought is a reasoning technique that explores and evaluates multiple branching paths of intermediate reasoning to develop a solution.

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