Handling Hardware and Software Faults in Distributed Systems

In modern computing, failure is not a matter of if, but when. Building reliable systems requires accepting that hardware will break, networks will partition, and software will crash. This course teaches you how to architect and maintain resilient systems that stay online even when individual components fail. You will transition from writing fragile applications to designing fault-tolerant architectures that handle real-world chaos gracefully. What you'll learn: Understand the core concepts of fault tolerance, high availability, and the CAP theorem; Design strategies to handle hardware failures like disk corruption and network partitions; Implement software mitigation patterns including circuit breakers, retries, and rate limiting; Apply modern consensus protocols and replication strategies to prevent data loss; Configure health checks, monitoring, and basic observability to detect issues early. This written course starts with essential terminology and foundational theory before guiding you through practical design patterns and architectural strategies. It is designed for software developers, system administrators, and aspiring DevOps engineers who are new to distributed systems. Start building systems that never sleep.