Comparison
Latent failurevsSilent failure
Latent failure
the backup had been failing silently for five months and you found out when you needed it.
A fault already present in the system that has not yet produced a visible failure. Untested backups, misconfigured alerts, an autoscaler that would not actually scale, a certificate nobody renewed. They accumulate quietly and are only found by deliberately looking — which is what game days, restore drills and failover exercises are for.
Full entry →Silent failure
every task is green, the run took its usual eleven minutes, and it processed zero rows.
A pipeline reporting success while producing nothing or producing nonsense. It is the characteristic data failure, because most pipeline code cannot tell the difference between 'no new data' and 'the filter is broken'. The only defences are assertions about the output rather than about the run — freshness, volume, distribution — which is why quality checks are operational monitoring in this domain rather than a testing nicety.
Full entry →