fault-isolation

Fault-isolation is an engineering technique that partitions a system into bounded regions such that a failure in one region cannot propagate beyond its boundaries. Parameters: (1) isolation boundaries — the logical or physical lines that contain failures; (2) containment mechanisms — the specific controls (timeouts, circuit-breakers, resource quotas, sandboxing) that enforce boundaries; (3) blast-radius specification — the maximum acceptable damage confined within a single region. Persistence: encoded in design patterns (circuit-breaker, bulkhead partition, bulkhead isolation), enforced by infrastructure tooling (service meshes, containers, resource limits), and sustained through operational practice (chaos engineering drills, failure mode and effects analysis, blameless post-mortems that reinforce isolation gaps). [formal: isolatio defectuum | substrate: mind | horizon: generations | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]