Swiss Cheese Model: Layered Defenses Against Failure
Think of system defenses as slices of Swiss cheese. An accident happens only when the holes—weaknesses in each layer—align. It's used in post-mortems to see how small failures combine into a major outage.
The Swiss Cheese Model frames accidents not as single failures, but as a chain of events. Imagine your system's defenses as stacked slices of Swiss cheese; a disaster only occurs when the holes in every layer align. This is crucial for post-mortems and resilient system design, helping teams analyze how multiple, minor issues can cascade into a major outage. The key mistake is blaming the final person or event; the model forces you to see and fix the systemic weaknesses in each defensive layer.
Read the original → Wikipedia: Swiss cheese model
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