The default position of a distributed system is failure. Networks fail. Machines fail. Systems fail.
The problem is APIs are, at their core, a complex distributed system. At some point in their lifetime, APIs will likely have to scale, maybe due to high-volume, large data-sets, a high-number of clients, or maybe just scale to rapid change. When this happens, we want our systems to bend not break.
This talk is a tour of how systems fail, combining analysis of how complex systems break at scale with anecdotes capturing the lighter side of catastrophic failure. We will then ground this with a set of practical tools and techniques to deal with building and testing complex systems for reliability.
This talk was presented at ScalaSyd, September 2015.
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