Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems

Coming Soon

This lesson will teach you how to build fault-tolerant distributed systems that gracefully handle failures and recover automatically. You’ll learn how to:

• Handle network partitions and split-brain scenarios
• Implement circuit breakers and backpressure mechanisms
• Build graceful degradation and fallback strategies
• Create automatic recovery and healing mechanisms
• Design systems that fail safely and recover quickly

What You’ll Build

By the end of this lesson, you’ll have implemented:

• Network partition detection and handling
• Circuit breaker patterns for external services
• Graceful degradation strategies
• Automatic recovery mechanisms
• Comprehensive fault tolerance testing

Key Concepts Preview

% Circuit breaker pattern
-record(circuit_state, {status = closed, failures = 0, last_failure}).

call_with_circuit_breaker(Fun, Args) ->
    case get_circuit_state() of
        #circuit_state{status = open} -> {error, circuit_open};
        #circuit_state{status = half_open} -> try_call(Fun, Args);
        #circuit_state{status = closed} -> execute_call(Fun, Args)
    end.

% Split-brain detection
detect_split_brain() ->
    ExpectedNodes = application:get_env(chat_server, cluster_nodes, []),
    ConnectedNodes = [node() | nodes()],
    case length(ConnectedNodes) < (length(ExpectedNodes) div 2) + 1 of
        true -> enter_minority_mode();
        false -> normal_operation()
    end.

This lesson builds on the distributed chat architecture from Lesson 27 and prepares you for the hot code reloading techniques we’ll explore in Lesson 29.

This lesson is currently under development. Check back soon for the complete content!