Blast-Radius Thinking

1. The Question That Replaces "Will It Fail"

At a certain scale the question stops being whether a component fails and becomes how much it takes with it.

That shift matters because the two questions have different answers. Making a component less likely to fail pays off less and less, and gets expensive quickly. Making its failure smaller is usually cheaper, and it works for the failures nobody predicted.

Blast radius is the set of things that stop working when one thing breaks