Data-Intensive Applications

There are three concerns in most software systems

Reliability

The system should tolerate system (hardware/software/humain) faults. To make system more fault tolerant, it makes sense to deliberately induce fault into the system. The netflix Chaos Monkey is a resiliency tool that helps applications tolerate random instance failures.

Scalability

There should be reasonable ways to deal with system grows (data volume, traffic, complexity).

Maintainability

The system should be easy to maintain with different engineers (growing number, turnover).