How To Eliminate Single Points of Failure

On today’s show we are talking about mission critical systems and the design principles that sit at the core of these systems. We keep hearing about catastrophic outages of key infrastructure.

A few weeks ago the city of Calgary was facing a severe water outage.

Over the past month, the network of Chrysler auto dealerships was facing a system wide outage that persisted for several days.

This past week, the vulnerability was punctuated by the flawed software update rolled out by cyber security firm Crowdstrike.

The Crowdstrike update affected airlines, banks, retailers, and countless other businesses. Thousands of flights were canceled over the past three days and the airline industry has still not recovered.

In order to create a system that is tolerant of failures, there are two main principles that must be followed.

1. there can be no single point of failure
2. No single point of repair

No single point of failure means that you have to design redundancy into your system. If your internet service comes from a single provider, then you have a single point of failure. Maybe you should have more than one internet service provider so that if one goes down, the other should still be in service. But if the optical fibre for both carriers travels through the same conduit, then that single conduit could become your single point of failure.

Resilience is the result of a way of thinking that starts with identifying those single points of failure.

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