Crash Only Software
Crash Only Software is a design principle where software components are built to handle failures exclusively by crashing and restarting, rather than implementing complex recovery logic. It emphasizes statelessness, idempotency, and fast restarts to achieve high reliability and simplicity in distributed systems. This approach treats crashes as a normal operational event, enabling systems to self-heal through automated restarts.
Developers should learn and apply Crash Only Software when building resilient, fault-tolerant systems, especially in cloud-native or microservices architectures where failures are inevitable. It is particularly useful for stateless services, such as web servers or API gateways, where restarting does not lead to data loss, simplifying error handling and reducing code complexity. This concept helps improve system availability by ensuring quick recovery from failures without manual intervention.