Storage glossary · JSON corpus · llms.txt · hesela.com

failure-domain · shipping · also fault domain

Failure domain

A failure domain is a group of components that can be affected by the same failure event because they share a dependency or physical location.

Related Observatory article: Failure domain on hesela.com

Hosts, racks, power supplies and network paths can define different failure domains. [1] Placing redundant data on separate hosts does not necessarily separate it across racks or power sources. [2] Domain boundaries describe the failures a placement policy is intended to isolate; they do not prove statistical independence between components in different domains.

Relations

related
crush-placement, placement-group, mirroring, erasure-coding

Citations

  1. Ford et al., Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems, OSDI 2010, section 4: failure domains (accessed 2026-10-13)
  2. Ceph Squid documentation: CRUSH Maps, hierarchy and placement rules (accessed 2026-10-13)
  3. Storage availability and correlated failures: placement boundaries (accessed 2026-10-13)

JSON: /data/terms/failure-domain.json