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Why Resilient Systems Design Is Critical for Cloud Reliability

James Kretchmar is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Cloud Technology at Akamai.

Key takeaways

Cloud reliability depends on designing systems for resilience rather than assuming flawless code, because software bugs are inevitable.

Systems architecture brings added complexity but also significant opportunities for advanced resilience.

Resilient architecture prevents minor bugs from escalating into major outages through varied techniques, such as redundancy, fault isolation, graceful degradation, automated incremental rollouts, and fail-safe modes.

Combining multiple resilience techniques is an effective and efficient way to create high availability services, although it remains vital to maintain high baseline reliability for each individual layer.

Welcome back to our reliability series

A few months ago, we set out to explore the subject of reliability in depth — from software and system complexity to…