Architecture & practice·Risk, blast radius and change
the validation was bypassed and the database constraint caught it anyway.
Defence in depth
Also calledlayered defence, defense in depth
Assuming any single control will eventually fail and putting independent ones behind it. It applies well beyond security: a rate limit at the gateway and in the service, validation at the edge and in the schema, a review gate and a canary. The requirement people miss is independence — three checks that all read the same misconfigured flag are one control wearing three hats.