Practice resilience engineering vocabulary: resilience vs. robustness, graceful degradation, and the difference from reliability engineering.
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A site reliability engineer says 'Resilience is the ability to adapt and recover.' How does this differ from reliability?
Reliability engineering focuses on preventing failures from occurring (reducing failure rate). Resilience engineering accepts that failures will happen and focuses on the system's ability to absorb disruption, adapt, and recover — minimizing impact duration and severity.
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A design review says 'The system degrades gracefully.' What does graceful degradation mean?
Graceful degradation means the system is designed so that partial failures lead to reduced functionality rather than total failure. For example, if the recommendation engine fails, the site still loads without recommendations rather than returning a 500 error.
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Your architecture document says 'Resilience vs. robustness: we prioritize resilience.' What is the key distinction?
Robustness is the ability to withstand stress without changing (strong but brittle). Resilience is the ability to adapt to stress and recover (flexible and adaptive). Resilient systems may temporarily degrade but recover; robust systems try not to degrade but can fail catastrophically when pushed past their limits.
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A conference talk says 'Reliability engineering focuses on preventing failure; resilience engineering prepares for it.' Which phrase best captures resilience engineering's core focus?
The core insight of resilience engineering is that in complex systems, failure is inevitable. Rather than only trying to prevent failure, resilience engineering designs explicit recovery paths, fallbacks, and adaptive responses into the system from the start.
5 / 5
A resilience review recommends 'adding redundancy, circuit breakers, and retry logic.' These are all examples of:
Redundancy (multiple instances), circuit breakers (fail-fast to prevent cascade), and retry logic (handle transient failures) are classic resilience patterns. They are engineering decisions made specifically to improve the system's ability to handle and recover from failures.