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What role does fault tolerance play in high-availability system design?
Asked on Oct 14, 2025
Answer
Fault tolerance is a critical component of high-availability system design, ensuring that systems continue to operate properly even in the event of component failures. By incorporating redundancy and failover mechanisms, fault-tolerant systems minimize downtime and maintain service continuity, aligning with principles from the Well-Architected Framework and reliability engineering.
Example Concept: Fault tolerance involves designing systems with redundant components such as load balancers, multiple instances, and distributed databases that can seamlessly take over in case of a failure. This approach often includes techniques like data replication, automatic failover, and health checks to detect and respond to failures quickly, thereby maintaining system availability and reliability.
Additional Comment:
- Fault tolerance is often achieved through redundancy and diversity in system components.
- Automated monitoring and alerting are essential for detecting failures promptly.
- Regular testing of failover mechanisms ensures they function correctly during actual failures.
- Designing for fault tolerance can increase costs, so it's important to balance with budget considerations.
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