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Sam Newman maps civil engineering's progressive collapse failures to distributed systems
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Sam Newman's presentation adapts the civil engineering concept of progressive collapse to distributed systems, using historical building failures to explain how to prevent cascading failures in software.
For engineers building distributed systems, understanding how a localized failure can trigger a catastrophic cascade is critical for resilience. Newman argues that techniques from civil engineering, such as isolating failures and reducing interconnections, can prevent similar collapses in software architectures.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
Sam Newman draws parallels between the 1968 Ronan Point tower collapse and cascading failures in distributed systems.
The presentation advocates for strengthening components, isolating failures, and reducing interconnections to prevent catastrophic cascades.
Newman uses real-world examples from civil engineering and AWS outages to illustrate resilience engineering strategies.
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