Fault Tolerance in the Cloud, Quantum & Life
In this post, we are going to explore Fault Tolerance in the world of cloud, quantum, and life.
Cloud Fault Tolerance
Most cloud providers often mention fault tolerance when it comes to selling their cloud solutions. According to AWS, fault tolerance refers to a system’s ability to remain functioning when a component failure occurs. In other words, the cloud infrastructure is capable of keeping our work up and running when a system disruption or network outage happens.
Imagine that we run a ticketing server system web application on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance behind a load balancer, and our app crashes due to server overload, caused by a sudden influx of user traffic. To mitigate that poor user experience issue, we can configure the load balancer settings.
In Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), we can create an Auto Scaling group, containing multiple Availability Zones, to make sure our load balancer points to healthy app instances. To improve the fault tolerance of our application, we can enable and configure dynamic scaling to scale the app to handle increased or irregular traffic.
Aside from load balancing, cloud fault tolerance can be achieved through redundancy, data replication across multiple locations (Multi-AZ), failover, disaster recovery, and other approaches. In the cloud world, fault tolerance plays a critical role to provide flexibility to ensure smooth operations during peak loads or failure events.
Quantum Fault Tolerance
Quantum fault tolerance refers to the capability of a quantum computer to perform reliable computations in the presence of errors or noise. To build a fault-tolerant quantum computer, Quantum Error Correction (QEC) and Quantum Error Migation (QEM) are two significant fields that help do the trick. Before diving into QEC & QEM, you might ask where the errors and noise arise from.
One of the common error sources in quantum systems is Decoherence. Quantum systems are highly susceptible to noise in their surrounding environment. It can be caused by temperature, electromagnetic radiation, unwanted interactions between the quantum system and its environment, etc. They corrupt the systems, leading to the loss of coherence and the introduction of errors/ inaccuracies. To protect the delicate quantum states & information from the impact of decoherence and other sources of errors, fault-tolerant strategies such as quantum error correction and mitigation are needed.
Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is an algorithm that encodes quantum states to protect quantum information. When an error is identified, the algorithm recovers the original quantum state, and the fixing process involves specific quantum gates and operations to encode data across the qubits.
QEC and QEM are two distinct ways to deal with errors in quantum systems. This post thread explains the difference between quantum error correction and mitigation, the former focuses on preserving the correct quantum information, while the latter aims to reduce errors to improve the accuracy of the quantum computations.
I find fault-tolerant quantum computing fascinating and how essential quantum error correction is to build large-scale quantum computers that are less prone to errors.
Life Fault Tolerance
Life fault tolerance denotes one’s resilience and adaptability to handle setbacks and function well in faulty situations. How do we become fault-tolerant humans in life? **Switching to this pensive pose to contemplate life**
The world has two sides; one side is surrounded by positive vibes, and the other is full of noise. Noise comes from either internal or external distractions and pressures. In the context of life, I suppose we are breathing machines that can be trained to process and overcome disturbances and stresses (noise!).
We strive to live, withstand, and recover from adversity. During that process, we learn how to cope with our faults, respond to drastic changes, and improve ourselves. “Faults promote evolvability.” This was taken from here that wrote about evolving digital circuits, and I believe this also applies to us. As we evolve and teach ourselves to adapt to new, adverse situations, we enhance our fault tolerance to operate in response to any unforeseen circumstances.
To borrow a quote from Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
