Design for Reliability

Techniques for developing reliable, robust networked systems that meet customers' expectations Today's customer expects valid service requests or transactions to be reliably executed with acceptable quality. Design for Reliability brings together the analysis, design, and system implementation principles necessary to build highly available, reliable systems. It fills the knowledge gap in this area, explaining techniques for framing verifiable availability/reliability requirements and methodically designing, analyzing, and testing systems to meet those requirements. This book takes a very pragmatic approach of framing reliability and robustness as concrete, functional attributes of a system, rather than abstract, non-functional notions. It is divided into three sections: Reliability Basics-frames the elements of a typical system; defines eight broad categories of errors that can produce critical system failures; and explains the failure recovery process Reliability Concepts-covers concepts for failure containment and recovery; reviews techniques that complement failure containment and redundancy to improve system reliability; outlines error detection and failure recovery mechanisms; provides design basics for reliable procedures; and offers information to help enterprises deploy robust operational policies to maximize highly available system operation Design for Reliability-reviews reliability requirements and analysis techniques; demonstrates downtime budgeting and modeling to assess the feasibility of meeting a system's service availability requirement; covers strategy and planning of robustness and stability testing; shows how field outage events can be analyzed to drive reliability improvements; and explains how to construct a reliability road map to methodically drive a system to achieve the ultimate service availability on a desired schedule A case study of design for reliability diligence of a networked system is then presented to illustrate appropriate considerations for developing a high-availability, high-reliability system. System architects, engineers, developers, testers, and project and product managers will rely on Design for Reliability to understand how all the key elements fit into the overall system design lifecycle in order to produce robust systems that achieve customers' expectations for service reliability and service availability. Quality professionals for products with high-availability expectations will also find this book useful in understanding what it takes to design and deploy robust systems.