Teams at NASA and JPL that create mission-critical software for spacecraft take a principled approach to fault tolerance. Let's see how those same principles, centered around a concept of transparency, can help us achieve reliability in pragmatic, modern software delivery settings.
As our society continues to depend more and more heavily on software, the need for that software to be reliable also increases. At the same time, the software systems we build as practitioners continue to become more and more complex, with many moving parts and unexpected, emergent behavior. How can those systems become as reliable and robust as the Voyager 2 deep space probe that made news recently and is still in service 46 years after its launch?
In this talk, we'll be drawing inspiration from an architectural paper that captures experiences from the aerospace industry. "GN&C [Guidance, Navigation, and Control] Fault Protection Fundamentals" by Robert D. Rasmussen describes four key principles for building fault-tolerant software, involving transparency of (1) objectives; (2) models; (3) knowledge; and (4) control. For each principle, we'll identify use cases from well-known software or protocols (e.g. HTTP) where we can see the principle in action; or, if the principle is not commonly applied, we'll describe how it might look in familiar settings like invoking RESTful or GRPC APIs.
Over his career, Jon Moore has been a researcher, management consultant, network engineer, small business owner, tech lead, architect, and technology executive. He is equally comfortable leading and managing teams and personally writing production-ready code. His current interests include distributed systems, fault tolerance, refactoring, building healthy and engaging engineering cultures, and Tex...