Summary

In this chapter, we explored techniques and tools to enhance distributed systems’ fault tolerance, stability, and performance. Using a healthcare management system as the domain, it contextualized real-world scenarios where failures in service communication, whether synchronous or asynchronous, can have critical implications. It identified potential failure points and provided actionable strategies and implementation code to mitigate them effectively.

We began by emphasizing the inevitability of failure in distributed systems, highlighting that modern applications must be designed to recover gracefully from faults rather than assume uninterrupted operations. In microservices architectures, where multiple services work independently and communicate across network boundaries, failures such as timeouts, unavailability, and authentication breakdowns can easily disrupt workflows. We also categorized these failures and demonstrated how resilient design mitigates their...