Speaker - Designing Systems That Contain Failure - CS Week Perú 2026

Designing Systems That Contain Failure — CS Week Perú 2026 On August 13, 2026, I had the opportunity to speak at CS Week Perú 2026 , an event organized by IEEE Computer Society student chapters across Peru. My session was: “Isolation and Trust Boundaries in Production: Designing Systems That Contain Failure” The talk explored how production systems can be designed to limit the impact of failures through explicit trust boundaries, architectural invariants, and evidence-based validation. The central idea was simple: The goal isn't to prevent every failure. The goal is to control its blast radius. Production systems fail. Requests overlap, processes crash, memory is exhausted, credentials can be compromised, and dependencies can become unavailable. Reliable engineering is not about assuming that none of these things will happen. It is about deciding what can be affected when they do . From Unit Tests to System Properties A green unit-test suite demonstrates that the tested units behave correctly under the conditions we defined. But it does not necessarily demonstrate that the system as a whole preserves its architectural properties under concurrency, multiple tenants, resource exhaustion, or real deployment conditions. A function can be correct in isolation while the system still violates an important invariant. That led to one of the central questions of the talk: What properties must never be violated? Trust Boundaries I used the concept of a Trust Boundary to make architectural assumptions explicit. For each boundary, we can ask three questions: What are we protecting? What is allowed to cross the boundary? What happens if the condition is violated? From there, we can define invariants : properties that the system must preserve under the conditions established by its design. In the architecture discussed during the session, three dimensions were particularly important: Context → Logical isolation Identity → Cryptographic isolation Execution → Physical/process isolat