Resilient Systems Design: Reliability, Recovery and Incident Management
Design systems that stay available, recover quickly, and grow stronger after failure.
Duration
4 weeksWeekly study
1 hourLanguages
English, Español, Italiano, Français, PortuguêsEnglish, Español100% online
How it works
Resilient Systems Design: Reliability, Recovery and Incident Management
This course has been certified by the CPD Certification Service as conforming to continuing professional development principles. Find out more.
Learn how to build systems that expect failure and recover with confidence
Modern systems rarely fail because of a single outage. Instead, complexity creates unexpected weaknesses.
As organisations rely increasingly on distributed infrastructure, cloud platforms, and interconnected services, resilience has become a critical skill for modern technology teams.
On this practical course, you’ll move beyond reactive firefighting and learn how to design systems that remain available during disruption, recover quickly from failure, and improve over time.
Design for failure before failure happens
Every resilient system begins with understanding what can go wrong.
You’ll investigate common failure patterns, single points of failure, and weaknesses within modern distributed systems. Along the way, you’ll learn how resilience engineering differs from traditional infrastructure design and why anticipating disruption is essential for long-term reliability.
Strengthen availability, recovery, and operational readiness
Next, you’ll focus on the architectural and operational practices that keep services running.
You’ll work through high availability, fault tolerance, redundancy models, failover strategies, load balancing, and disaster recovery planning. You’ll also develop practical understanding of RTO/RPO, backup strategies, recovery testing, and operational runbooks that support rapid recovery during critical events.
Learn from incidents and improve continuously
You’ll examine observability, monitoring, alerting, escalation processes, and incident management practices that help teams identify problems early and respond effectively.
By the end of the course, you’ll be able to evaluate system resilience, design recovery strategies, and contribute to more reliable, adaptable technology environments.
Syllabus
Week 1
Foundations of Resilient Systems
Lesson 1 : Understanding System Failures
Understand why failures are inevitable in modern systems, how they occur across infrastructure, applications, and operations, and why designing with failure in mind is essential for resilience.
Lesson 2 : What Makes a System Resilient
Explore what makes systems resilient rather than fragile, including how they absorb failures, adapt to disruptions, and continue delivering critical functionality under stress.
Lesson 3 : Core Principles of Resilience Engineering
Learn the core principles of resilience engineering, including anticipation, monitoring, response, and learning, and how they help systems withstand, recover from, and adapt to failures.
Week 2
High Availability and Fault Tolerance Design
Lesson 4 : High Availability Fundamentals
Understand high availability, how it differs from basic reliability, why it matters for modern systems, and how uptime requirements shape architectural decisions.
Lesson 5 : Redundancy and Failover Strategies
Explore redundancy models and failover mechanisms, including active-active, active-passive, and automated failover strategies that help maintain continuity and reduce downtime.
Lesson 6 : Fault Tolerance Patterns
Examine fault tolerance patterns such as isolation, graceful degradation, and error handling, and learn how they help resilient systems keep operating during failures.
Week 3
Disaster Recovery Planning and Operational Readiness
Lesson 7 : Backup and Recovery Planning
Learn backup and recovery concepts, including how system criticality, business requirements, recovery objectives, and backup approaches shape recovery strategies.
Lesson 8 : Disaster Recovery Testing
Validate disaster recovery plans through structured testing. Explore testing methods and learn how regular tests reveal gaps, improve readiness, and strengthen recovery confidence.
Lesson 9 : Runbooks and Operational Readiness
Examine how operational runbooks support consistent recovery. Learn how clear procedures, defined roles, and validation steps reduce recovery time and operational errors during incidents.
Week 4
Monitoring, Observability, and Incident Management
Lesson 10 : Observability Foundations
Explore observability as a core capability for understanding system behaviour, and learn how logs, metrics, and traces work together to reveal system health and performance.
Lesson 11 : Alerting and Escalation Strategies
Learn how alerting and escalation strategies support timely incident response, reduce alert noise, prioritise issues, and guide teams toward effective operational decisions.
Lesson 12 : Incident Review and Continuous Improvement
Examine how structured incident reviews support learning and improvement by identifying root causes, capturing lessons learned, and strengthening long-term system resilience.
Lesson 13 : Course Conclusion
Review the key concepts from the course, reflect on resilience strategies and design decisions, and identify how to apply resilient system practices in real-world environments.
Who is this accredited by?
The CPD Certification Service was established in 1996 and is the leading independent CPD accreditation institution operating across industry sectors to complement the CPD policies of professional and academic bodies.
When would you like to start?
Start straight away and join a global classroom of learners. If the course hasn’t started yet you’ll see the future date listed below.
Available now
Learning on this course
On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.
What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...
- Apply resilience engineering principles to identify failure risks in modern systems.
- Apply high availability and fault tolerance strategies to improve system uptime.
- Apply disaster recovery planning methods using RTO and RPO requirements.
- Apply observability and incident management practices to strengthen operational resilience.
Who is the course for?
This course is designed for IT engineers, DevOps professionals, SREs, architects, operations teams, and technical leaders who want to design reliable systems, improve resilience, and strengthen disaster recovery and incident management capabilities.
Who will you learn with?
Who developed the course?
Starweaver
Starweaver is a next generation platform that engages your workforce as no other. Combining business and technical skills, Starweaver provides real-time skill building that is in line with your business objectives and strategies, and in your associates day to day tasks and jobs.
| Best ValueBest Value - learn more, save more! | |||
Ways to learn | Buy this course | Subscribe & save | Start learning today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Choose the best way to learn for you! | $79/one-off payment | $244.99 for a whole year Automatically renews | Free |
| Fulfill your current learning need | Develop skills to further your career | Try this course - with limits | |
| Access to this course | tick | tick | Limited to 4 weeks |
| Access to 1,000+ courses | cross | tick | cross |
| Learn at your own pace | tick | tick | cross |
| Discuss your learning in comments | tick | tick | tick |
| Certificate when you're eligible | Printed and digital | Digital only | cross |
Cancel for free anytime |
Ways to learn
Choose the best way to learn for you!
Subscribe & save
$244.99 for a whole year
Automatically renews
Develop skills to further your career
- Access to this course
- Access to 1,000+ courses
- Learn at your own pace
- Discuss your learning in comments
- Digital certificate when you're eligible
Cancel for free anytime
Buy this course
$79/one-off payment
Fulfill your current learning need
- Access to this course
- Learn at your own pace
- Discuss your learning in comments
- Printed and digital certificate when you’re eligible
Start learning today
Free
Try this course - with limits
- Limited to 4 weeks
Find out more about certificates, Unlimited or buying a course (Upgrades) Sale price available until 2 November 2026 at 23:59 (UTC). T&Cs apply. | |||
Find out more about certificates, Unlimited or buying a course (Upgrades)
Sale price available until 2 November 2026 at 23:59 (UTC). T&Cs apply.
Learning on FutureLearn
Your learning, your rules
- Courses are split into weeks, activities, and steps to help you keep track of your learning
- Learn through a mix of bite-sized videos, long- and short-form articles, audio, and practical activities
- Stay motivated by using the Progress page to keep track of your step completion and assessment scores
Join a global classroom
- Experience the power of social learning, and get inspired by an international network of learners
- Share ideas with your peers and course educators on every step of the course
- Join the conversation by reading, @ing, liking, bookmarking, and replying to comments from others
Map your progress
- As you work through the course, use notifications and the Progress page to guide your learning
- Whenever you’re ready, mark each step as complete, you’re in control
- Complete 90% of course steps and all of the assessments to earn your certificate
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