Antifragility, fail fast, and self healing

Antifragility is a technique successfully experimented with at Netflix. It is one of the most powerful approaches to build fail-safe systems in modern software development.

The antifragility concept is introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

In the antifragility practice, software systems are consistently challenged. Software systems evolve through these challenges, and, over a period of time, get better and better to withstand these challenges. Amazon's Game Day exercise and Netflix's Simian Army are good examples of such antifragility experiments.

Fail Fast is another concept used to build fault-tolerant, resilient systems. This philosophy advocates systems that expect failures versus building systems that never fail. Importance has to be given to how quickly the system can fail, and, if it fails, how quickly it can recover from that failure. With this approach, the focus is shifted from Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) to Mean Time To Recover (MTTR). A key advantage of this approach is that if something goes wrong, it kills itself, and the downstream functions won't be stressed.

Self-Healing is commonly used in microservices deployments, where the system automatically learns from failures and adjusts itself. These systems also prevent future failures.