Reliability

Blast Radius

How much of the system a single failure affects.

Why interviewers ask about it

Cell-based architecture bounds it: partition users into independent vertical stacks so a bad deploy damages 5% rather than everyone.

Bounded, separate resource pools per dependency so one slow dependency cannot starve the others.

Any component whose failure alone stops the system.

This term is part of the free System Design interview preparation module - browse the full glossary for every definition.