jargon

Backend & systems·Resilience and failure handling

you ask how much of the product breaks if this one component dies, and design so the answer is not "all of it".

Blast radius

The scope of impact when a given component fails. Reducing it is the point of cells, shards, bulkheads and per-tenant isolation. It is also the right frame for reviewing a change: not "will this break" but "what breaks with it".

Commonly confused with