Single Point of Failure
Single Point of Failure (SPOF) is a system design flaw where the failure of a single component can cause the entire system to stop functioning. It is a critical concept in reliability engineering, fault tolerance, and high-availability systems. Identifying and eliminating SPOFs is essential for building resilient architectures in software, hardware, and network infrastructure.
Developers should learn about SPOF to design systems that are robust and minimize downtime, especially for mission-critical applications like e-commerce, banking, or healthcare. Understanding SPOF helps in implementing redundancy, failover mechanisms, and load balancing to ensure continuous service availability. It is crucial for DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE), and cloud architecture roles where system resilience is a priority.