Decoder. plain-English AI glossary

Redundancy

● Core

Having backups of critical systems so if one fails, another is ready to take over.

Think of it like

Having two parachutes instead of one.

Example

Three inference servers instead of one — any two going down still leaves one answering requests.

How it actually works

Redundancy costs money but buys uptime. For stateless services (like inference), it's simple — just run more copies. For stateful services, you need distributed consensus and careful coordination. Redundancy has to cover everything: servers, storage, network.

For product teams

Redundancy is the most straightforward way to improve uptime and user trust.

For engineers

Redundancy is cheap compared to downtime; over-invest here.

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