Overview: Service and Application Resiliency

Objective

In the Modern Design Patterns for Scalability chapter, we reviewed some patterns for addressing scalability within our application. An equally important concept is that of resiliency, meaning the likelihood of a service or application handling errors or exceptions at runtime. Accounting for changes in traffic and usage for components doesn’t mean much if the components themselves don’t function properly or don’t provide any clear means of tracking down the root causes of issues.

There’s always the possibility that a cloud service could experience a brief outage or an extended period of downtime that is completely out of the hands of those who maintain the application or platform.