Fault Tolerance Design Patterns in Distributed Systems

Distributed systems are made up of multiple interconnected components that work together to provide a service. These components are often geographically dispersed and run on different hardware and software platforms. This complexity makes distributed systems more susceptible to faults and failures than centralized systems.

In distributed systems, a single fault or failure in one component can cause a ripple effect that affects other components and ultimately leads to a system-wide failure. Therefore, fault tolerance is critical in distributed systems to ensure that the system continues to function even in the presence of faults.

A fault-tolerant distributed system is designed to detect, isolate, and recover from faults and failures. It should be able to identify the location and scope of the fault, isolate the affected components, and continue to provide the service with minimal disruption to the end users.

Without fault tolerance, distributed systems are prone to downtime, data loss, and performance degradation, which can lead to financial losses, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust. Therefore, fault tolerance is a key requirement for any distributed system that aims to provide a reliable and high-performing service.

A fault-tolerant design aims to minimize the impact of faults by anticipating them and designing the system in a way that it can either continue to function or recover from the fault without compromising the overall system performance or reliability.

Let us look at some examples of fault tolerance design patterns. I have chosen Circuit Breaker Design Pattern and Bulkhead Design Pattern

Circuit Breaker Pattern:

The circuit breaker pattern is a software design pattern that is used to prevent cascading failures in a distributed system. It is named after the circuit breaker in an electrical circuit, which is designed to prevent an electrical overload from causing damage to the system.

In the context of software architecture, the circuit breaker pattern involves wrapping calls to a remote service or API in a circuit breaker object. This object monitors the number of failures that occur when calling the remote service…