Failure Modes and Edge Cases Questions

Understanding how systems fail, how to identify rare edge cases, and how to design for resilience and recoverability. Includes classification of common failure types such as network partitions, resource exhaustion, dependency failures, configuration errors, data corruption, and cascading failures; design techniques such as bulkheading, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and fallback strategies; retry and backoff patterns and idempotency design; failure injection, chaos engineering, and other testing methods to surface edge cases; observability approaches for detecting and diagnosing rare failures and tail latency; designing safe defaults and defensive code; and postmortem practices and corrective actions to reduce recurrence.