Managing FastAPI Projects with Poetry: A Step-by-Step Guide

Software systems must provide users with reliable and continuous service. Two key concepts at the heart of this goal are Reliability and Availability.
Many people confuse these terms or use them interchangeably. However, in system architecture, it is crucial to understand the difference and consider them separately.
How long does the system operate without failure?
Reliability refers to a system’s ability to operate continuously without errors.
In other words, once the system starts, how long can it run without interruption or failure?
How often is the system accessible to users?
Availability is the proportion of time a system is able to respond to user requests — essentially, how often the system is in a usable state.
Availability = MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR)
Level | Allowed Downtime per Year |
---|---|
99.9% (Three Nines) | ~8.76 hours |
99.99% (Four Nines) | ~52.6 minutes |
Goal | Core Strategy | Example Technologies |
---|---|---|
Reliability | Prevent failures from occurring | - Static analysis, unit tests, CI/CD- Error tracking, logging - Hardware redundancy (RAID, UPS) - Memory error protection (ECC RAM) - Consumer Contract Testing for microservices |
Availability | Recover quickly from failures | - Kubernetes self-healing- Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) - Active-Passive / Active-Active redundancy - Load Balancer for traffic distribution - Circuit Breakers to prevent cascading failures - Zero-downtime deployment (Blue-Green, Canary) |
Common to Both | Monitoring & incident response | - Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana)- Health checks - Alerting (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) - Logging & tracing (ELK, Jaeger) |
Reliability and Availability are both essential — but they serve different purposes.
A highly reliable system doesn’t necessarily guarantee high availability, and vice versa. Design priorities should be driven by business goals and user expectations.
System Type | Primary Focus | Reason |
---|---|---|
Hospital System | Reliability | Lives depend on uninterrupted operation |
E-commerce Site | Availability | Must always be accessible to maintain sales |
Financial System | Both | Requires real-time responsiveness and trustworthiness |
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