Designing Distributed Systems for Failure

When transitioning from monolithic to distributed architectures, the most difficult mental shift is embracing failure as a feature, not a bug.

If your system spans multiple servers, regions, and network boundaries, the question isn't if a component will fail, but when.

The Fallacies of Distributed Computing

We often assume the network is reliable, latency is zero, and bandwidth is infinite. Operating under these assumptions in an enterprise environment guarantees downtime.

Circuit Breakers

Instead of continuously hammering a failing service and cascading the outage, we implement the Circuit Breaker pattern.

func (c *CircuitBreaker) Execute(req Request) (Response, error) {
    if c.State == Open {
        return nil, ErrCircuitOpen
    }
    // Attempt request...
}

Chaos Engineering

The only way to verify resilience is to introduce failure on purpose. Terminating random EC2 instances during business hours forces teams to prioritize automated recovery.