Crash Fault Tolerance
Crash Fault Tolerance (CFT) is a property of distributed systems that ensures continued operation and data consistency when some components fail due to crashes or unexpected terminations, without malicious intent. It focuses on handling non-Byzantine failures where nodes stop responding or crash but do not behave arbitrarily. This concept is fundamental in designing reliable systems like databases, consensus protocols, and cloud services that must maintain availability despite partial failures.
Developers should learn and implement CFT when building distributed applications, such as financial systems, e-commerce platforms, or real-time data processing, where high availability and data integrity are critical. It is essential for ensuring that systems can recover from hardware failures, network partitions, or software crashes without data loss or service disruption, often using techniques like replication, leader election, and state machine replication.