Resiliency and autoscaling

As funny as it may sound, in order to design and build resilient systems, we need to expect things to fail and break apart. In other words, in order to engineer resilient systems, we need to engineer for failure and provide ways for applications and infrastructure to recover from failures automatically.

Resiliency

This characterizes an application and infrastructure that can automatically recover from failures. The ability to recover without manual intervention is often called self-healing.

We’ve already seen self-healing in action in Chapter 6 when Kubernetes detected that the desired state and the current state were different and quickly spawned additional application replicas. This is possible thanks to the Kubernetes reconciliation loop.

There are, of course, ways to build resilient applications and infrastructure without Kubernetes. For example, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud offers Autoscaling Groups, which allow you to...