Text taken from video description.
<aside> 💡 A single point of failure(SPOF) in computing is a critical point in the system whose failure can take down the entire system. A lot of resources and time is spent on removing single points of failure in an architecture/design.
</aside>
One way to mitigate the problem is to use multiple instances of every component in the service. The graph of dependencies then becomes more flexible, allowing the system to resiliently switch to another service instead of failing requests. Another approach is to have backups which allow a quick switch over on failure. The backups are useful in components dealing with data, like databases.
System with lesser SPOFs
Allocating more resources, distributing the system and replication are some ways of mitigating the problem of SPOF. Hence designs include horizontal scaling capabilities and partitioning.
It is important to note that the CAP theorem does not allow removing SPOFs if perfect consistency is required.
Netflix has something called Chaoss Monkey.