It doesn’t matter how beautiful, loosely coupled, scalable, highly concurrent, non-blocking, responsive and performant your application is––if it isn't running, then it's 100% useless. Without resilience, nothing else matters.

Most developers understand what the word resilience means, at least superficially, but way too many lack a deeper understanding of what it really means in the context of the system that they are working on now. I find it really sad to see, since understanding and managing failure is more important today than ever. Outages are incredibly costly—for many definitions of cost—and can sometimes take down whole businesses.

In this talk we will explore the essence of resilience. What does it really mean? What is its mechanics and characterizing traits? How do other sciences and industries manage it, and what can we learn from that? We will see that everything hints at the same conclusion;  that failure is inevitable and needs to be embraced, and that resilience is by design.