Risk & Resilience
Failure is a certainty, not a possibility. These models help you contain it, absorb it, recover from it, and learn from it.
- No. 042
Margin of Safety
Build in buffer for what you can't predict. The future is usually worse than the plan.
- No. 043
Blast Radius
Limit how much can break when any one thing fails.
- No. 044
Single Point of Failure
Any component whose failure stops the whole system is a risk you've chosen, knowingly or not.
- No. 045
Defense in Depth
Layer independent safeguards so no single failure leads to compromise.
- No. 046
Swiss Cheese Model
Accidents happen when holes in several imperfect defences line up at the same moment.
- No. 047
Graceful Degradation
When parts fail, keep the core experience working instead of failing completely.
- No. 048
Antifragility and Chaos Engineering
Some systems get stronger from stress. Inject failure deliberately to find weaknesses before they find you.
- No. 049
Normal Accidents
In tightly coupled, interactively complex systems, accidents are inevitable — they are normal.
- No. 050
Ironies of Automation
Automating the routine work leaves people with the hardest tasks, monitoring they do poorly, and fading skills, just when a failure needs them most.