On 6/30/12, Todd Underwood <toddunder@gmail.com> wrote:
On Jun 30, 2012 11:23 AM, "Seth Mattinen" <sethm@rollernet.us> wrote:
But haven't they all been cascading failures? No. They have not. That's not what that term means.
'Cascading failure' has a fairly specific meaning that doesn't imply resilience in the face of decomposition into smaller parts. Cascading
Not sure where you're going there; Cascading failures are common, but fortunately are usually temporary or have some kind of scope limit. Cascading just means you have a dependency between components, where the failure of one component may result in the failure of a second component, the failure of the second component results in failure of a third component, and this process continues until no more components are dependent or no more components are still operating. This can happen to the small pieces inside of one specific system, causing that system to collapse. It's just as valid to say Cascading failure is across across larger/more complex pieces of different higher level systems, where the components of one system aren't sufficiently independent of those in other systems, causing both systems to fail. Your application logic can be a point of failure, just as readily as your datacenter can. Cascades can happen at a higher level where entire systems are dependant upon entire other systems. And it can happen Organizationally, External dependancy risk occurs when an entire business is dependant on another organization (such as product support), to remotely administer software they sold, and the subcontracter of the product support org. stops doing their job, or a smaller component (one member of their staff) becomes a rogue/malicious element. -- -JH