Resilience is a key characteristic of distributed systems. In a presentation by Konrad Baechler, co-founder of the diva.exchange association at the University of Lucerne (HSLU), he discusses the properties of resilience, which ensures the availability and consistency of results in distributed systems even in the face of failures or attacks.

What Is Resilience?

Resilience means that a distributed system must:

• Remain accessible to users.
• Provide consistent query results.
• Be resistant to failures and attacks.

A fundamental mechanism ensuring resilience is Byzantine fault tolerance. It guarantees that even if some nodes in the system behave maliciously (for example, by intentionally providing false data), the correct nodes will still be able to reach a consensus and deliver accurate results. In previous posts on the diva.exchange blog, we provided a detailed explanation of how Byzantine fault tolerance works.

Key Principles of Resilience

Achieving high resilience requires following several key principles:

• No Single Point of Failure. A distributed system should not have critical components whose failure would render the entire system unavailable. For example, if a single server goes down and all nodes lose synchronization, this is unacceptable and jeopardizes the entire system.
• More Nodes, Higher Stability. Scalability plays a crucial role. The more nodes participating in consensus, the harder it is to attack or disrupt the system.
• Balancing Resilience and Performance. A system should be resilient and fast enough to remain useful for users.

Practical Recommendations

Experience in developing distributed systems shows that success depends on several key practices:

• Create Local Testing Environments. To conduct tests in a local environment, it is recommended that a containerized version of the system be deployed.
• Functional Testing Is Crucial. Ensure that all system modules interact correctly with each other.
• Comprehensive Logging and Error Analysis Mechanisms. Logs should be centralized (at least in the testing environment) to facilitate problem analysis.
• Time is not a factor. Relying on a time server does not make sense in a fully distributed environment. Distributed systems must operate without time synchronization.
• Regularly Assess Costs and Benefits. While distributed systems can offer high resilience, their economic viability depends on specific use cases.

Conclusion

Resilience is not just about withstanding failures – it is a fundamental principle of modern digital system design. The better a distributed system’s architecture is planned, the more reliably it operates in real-world conditions. Considering all these factors, companies building fault-tolerant platforms can gain significant competitive advantages.

THIS IS DIVA.EXCHANGE

The non-profit association diva.exchange, Switzerland, uses a barrier-free and collaborative approach to create free banking technology for everyone. Open-source technology ensures the privacy of all participants in the financial system of the future. The blockchain-based system is fully distributed. Everyone can participate in diva.exchange.

Diva.exchange is committed to the belief that only commercially free technology can reliably protect user privacy.

Collaboration with the scientific community plays an important role in the development of diva.exchange. The results of diva.exchange research are constantly being validated by academic institutions and publicly presented at specialized conferences.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR WORK

All technical information is available at: https://github.com/diva-exchange/

I2P beginner’s guide and installation guide:https://www.diva.exchange/en/privacy/introduction-to-i2p-your-own-internet-secure-private-and-free/

All videos are here: https://odysee.com/@diva.exchange:d/

Introduction to I2P: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P

Testnet of diva.exchange: https://testnet.diva.exchange

CONTACT US

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Mastodon: https://social.diva.exchange/@social

If you still have questions you can always find us on Telegram: https://t.me/diva_exchange_chat_de (in English, German, or Russian.