Fault Tolerance
A system's ability to continue operating when some components fail.
Plain English
Part of the system can fail without stopping everything.
In context
Fault tolerance uses redundancy isolation retries or degradation to limit the effect of component failure.
Example
“Replica failover gives the database fault tolerance.”
When you'll hear this
- architecture review
- reliability planning
- incident review
Common misunderstanding
Fault tolerance reduces impact but cannot make failure impossible.
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-25
