Resilience Glossary

Browse 28 resilience terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

28 Resilience Terms

Availability
The property that systems, data, and services remain accessible and usable when needed by authorized users. In security, availability is one of the core goals...
Availability Pattern
A recurring design approach used to keep systems responsive and recoverable despite failures, such as retries, circuit breakers, failover, replication, and...
Backoff
A retry strategy where the delay between attempts increases (typically exponentially) after each failure. Prevents overwhelming a recovering service with a...
Backpressure
A flow control mechanism where a slow consumer signals an upstream producer to slow down, preventing buffer overflow and memory exhaustion. Without...
Bulkhead Pattern
Bulkhead Pattern is a software resilience design pattern inspired by the watertight compartments in a ship's hull that prevent a single breach from sinking the...
Chaos Engineering
The discipline of intentionally injecting failures into production systems to verify they can withstand turbulent conditions. Netflix's Chaos Monkey randomly...
Chaos Monkey Culture
A reliability mindset that values failure testing, resilience drills, and systems that can tolerate component loss under realistic conditions.
Circuit Breaker
A design pattern that prevents an application from repeatedly trying to execute an operation that's likely to fail, giving the failing service time to recover....
Connection Retry
A repeated attempt to establish or reestablish a connection after an initial failure, usually with backoff and limits. Connection retry behavior is important...
Crypto Agility
Crypto Agility is the ability to replace algorithms, key sizes, or protocol settings without redesigning the whole system. Security teams use it to enforce...
Cyber Resilience
Cyber Resilience is the ability of an organization to prepare for, withstand, recover from, and adapt after cyber incidents. Security teams use it to enforce...
Data Backup Security
The protection of backup data and backup systems so they cannot be stolen, encrypted by attackers, silently corrupted, or misused during recovery. It includes...
Data Recovery
The process of restoring lost, deleted, damaged, or inaccessible data from backups, replicas, or underlying media. In security incidents, recovery quality...
Failure
An outcome where something does not work as intended, whether at the level of a project, system, decision, or plan. In healthy technical culture failure is not...
Fault Tolerant Culture
A culture that assumes failures will happen and therefore values resilience, redundancy, graceful degradation, and calm recovery rather than magical thinking....
Graceful Degradation
A design philosophy where a system continues to function with reduced capability when a component fails, rather than failing completely. The website still...
High Availability Security
The security and resilience measures used to keep critical services available even during attacks, failures, or maintenance events. It combines redundancy,...
Load Shedding
A resilience strategy where a system intentionally drops or rejects excess requests during overload to protect core functionality. Unlike rate limiting...
Operational Resilience
The ability of an organization to continue delivering critical services during and after disruptions such as cyberattacks, outages, third-party failures, or...
Out-of-Band Management
Administrative access provided through a separate network path or control interface from the normal production data plane, such as iLO, DRAC, serial consoles,...
Recovery Point Objective
The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time after an outage or disaster. It shows up in application security, identity, infrastructure, or...
Recovery Time Objective
The target time within which a system or business function must be restored after disruption. It shows up in application security, identity, infrastructure, or...
Redundancy Security
The security and reliability considerations around redundant systems, links, or components designed to keep services running during failures or attacks....
Retry
Automatically re-attempting a failed operation — typically a network request, database query, or message delivery — under the assumption that the failure is...
Retry Policy
A configurable strategy governing how retries are performed — specifying which errors are retryable, the maximum number of attempts, the backoff algorithm...
The Bus Test
A blunt way to assess how badly a team would suffer if one key person disappeared unexpectedly. In engineering slang, the bus test highlights concentration of...
Timeout
A configured maximum duration that a system will wait for an operation (network request, database query, lock acquisition) to complete before aborting it and...
Win Some Lose Some
A resigned acknowledgment that not every outcome will go your way. In engineering slang, it is often used after a tradeoff that helped one metric or team and...

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