Building Resilient Distributed Systems

When every safeguard is in place and your distributed system still fails, a simplistic, narrow view of system resilience is no longer enough. Modern software architectures, amplified by unpredictable AI components, demand a different approach to preventing catastrophic downtime. In Building Resilient Distributed Systems, author Sam Newman offers a modern blueprint for surviving real-world system failures. The book combines wisdom from safety-critical systems with proven patterns, giving you a practical pathway to building more resilient AI-powered software that adapts and endures. Whether you're refining an existing system, creating new distributed systems, or simply striving to grasp the essence of resilience, you'll learn how to design systems that fail gracefully instead of collapsing. By the end, you'll be able to: Grasp the true essence of resilience by integrating safety and human factors Make use of patterns that improve system stability Translate resilience theories into practical actions Understand critical architectural trade-offs to ensure systems degrade gracefully Learn how distributed systems are fundamentally sociotechnical systems that sit at the intersection of people and technology Embrace the necessary cultural and behavioral shifts to support a resilient system