What type of computing ensures systems continue to operate even in the event of failure?

Fault tolerant computing is designed specifically to ensure that a system continues to operate reliably even in the event of hardware or software failures. This is achieved by incorporating redundancy and error detection mechanisms within the system architecture. If one component fails, another can take over without interrupting the overall service, thus maintaining continuous operation.

For instance, in a fault-tolerant system, critical processes may have duplicate components. If the primary component fails, the system seamlessly switches to the backup, allowing ongoing functionality. This approach is essential in environments where uptime is crucial, such as in financial systems or healthcare applications.

In contrast, high availability computing focuses on minimizing downtime and ensuring system availability through various strategies like load balancing and clustering, but it may not provide the same level of redundancy for individual components as fault tolerant computing does. Cloud computing and server-less computing represent different paradigms of service delivery and resource management but do not inherently guarantee continuous operation in the face of failures as fault tolerant systems do.