Lambda the Ultimate

by Jim Gray, via Joe Armstrong and apropos Crash-only software.

An analysis of the failure statistics of a commercially available fault-tolerant system shows that administration and software are the major contributors to failure. Various approaches to software fault-tolerance are then discussed -- notably process-pairs, transactions and reliable storage. It is pointed out that faults in production software are often soft (transient) and that a transaction mechanism combined with persistent process-pairs provides fault-tolerant execution -- the key to software fault-tolerance.

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