There are several ways an architect can design for fault tolerance in a web application:
1. Load balancing: Use load balancing techniques to distribute workloads across multiple servers. This ensures that no single server handles all the incoming traffic and reduces the risk of server failure.
2. Redundancy: Incorporate redundancy in the system to ensure that if one component fails, it can be replaced by another without affecting the operation of the application. For instance, use multiple database servers, so if one goes down, the other can take over.
3. Failover: Configure a system that can automatically switch to a standby component if the primary component fails. For example, if the database server fails, the application can automatically switch to another database server.
4. Monitoring: Monitor the application to detect faults and take corrective action before the failure leads to downtime. Alerting mechanisms can be put in place to notify the relevant parties when a critical component like a server or database fails.
5. Distributed architecture: Design the application to be distributed so that the failure of one component does not bring down the entire application. Instead of having a monolithic architecture, an architect can use microservices to distribute functionality across multiple services that can communicate with each other.
6. Replication: Data replication between multiple servers can be used to ensure that data is available even if one server fails. In this way, the application can still operate even if a server goes down.
7. Graceful degradation: If a component fails, some less critical features or services can be degraded or temporarily disabled to allow the application to continue operating at a basic level.
In summary, architects can design for fault tolerance in web applications by incorporating redundancy, failover, load balancing, monitoring, distributed architecture, replication, and graceful degradation.
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