Practical Methods for Building Reliable Backend Systems

Abstract

This thesis explores practical methods of improving the reliability of backend systems, targeting methods that are practical to implement, accessible without significant investment into tooling or specialised personnel, and impactful in minimising failures. Its objective is to provide actionable recommendations comprising general guidelines, tools, and development practices. The methodology used to identify areas of interest involved reviewing academic literature, widely reported industry best practices, and technical documentation.

The study found that the reliability of backend systems can be substantially increased by making targeted improvements in architecture, quality assurance, and operational practices. Fault tolerance strategies, such as eliminating single points of failure and handling transient errors, can enable systems to remain operational despite some components failing. Software testing the codebase, its critical components, and its most common user journeys can enable the early detection and repair of faults. Monitoring and observability tools allow teams to detect and diagnose failures in production.

The thesis concludes that teams can build more reliable backend systems by incrementally adopting these practices, tools, and methods. The findings apply to codebases of various sizes, architectures, and programming languages. While they do not cover every aspect of reliability, they provide a solid baseline that can be expanded upon according to project-specific requirements.