Articles
Avoiding fallback in distributed systems
A genuinely counterintuitive argument from AWS's own playbook: fallback logic — the code path meant to save you when the primary system fails — is often the riskier system, precisely because it almost never runs and so almost never gets tested under real conditions. I've seen this bite teams that were proud of their "graceful degradation" story; the fix argued for here is investing that same engineering effort into making the primary path more reliable instead of building a second, untested one. Changed how I run resilience design reviews.