Sam Newman Excerpt: Building Resilient AI-Powered Software and Planning for Failure
The Pragmatic Engineer · rss · 2026-10-14
An excerpt from Sam Newman's new O'Reilly book 'Building Resilient Distributed Systems' (three years in the making, fully revised for AI) on The Pragmatic Engineer. Covers disaster recovery fundamentals (RPO/RTO trade-offs), DR patterns (backup-restore, pilot light, warm failover, active-active), how GPU/CPU shortages break assumptions of infrastructure availability, resilience challenges specific to AI-powered software (provider outages, model changes, observability), and tactics like multi-vendor redundancy and transparent costs. Context: AI agents shipping more code means more incidents.
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